The Rise of Whatever
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But for me the biggest issue with all this — that I don't see covered in here, or maybe just a little bit in passing — is what all of this is doing to beginners, and the learning pipeline.
> There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge that vaguely resembles it. That isn’t programming, though.
> I glimpsed someone on Twitter a few days ago, also scoffing at the idea that anyone would decide not to use the Whatever machine. I can’t remember exactly what they said, but it was something like: “I created a whole album, complete with album art, in 3.5 hours. Why wouldn’t I use the make it easier machine?”
When you're a beginner, it's totally normal to not really want to put in the hard work. You try drawing a picture, and it sucks. You try playing the guitar, and you can't even get simple notes right. Of course a machine where you can just say "a picture in the style of Pokémon, but of my cat" and get a perfect result out is much more tempting to a 12 year old kid than the prospect of having to grind for 5 years before being kind of good.
But up until now, you had no choice and to keep making crappy pictures and playing crappy songs until you actually start to develop a taste for the effort, and a few years later you find yourself actually pretty darn competent at the thing. That's a pretty virtuous cycle.
I shudder to think where we'll be if the corporate-media machine keeps hammering the message "you don't have to bother learning how to draw, drawing is hard, just get ChatGPT to draw pictures for you" to young people for years to come.
Tech never ever prevents people who really want to hone their skills from doing so. World record of 100m sprint kept improving even since car was invented. World record of how many digits of pi memorized kept improving even when a computer does that indefinitely times better.
It's ridiculous to think drawing will become a lost art because of LLM/Diffusal models when we live in a reality where powerlifting is a thing.
As ever, the standard defence of LLM and all gen AI tech rests on this reduction of complex subjectivity to something close to objectivity: the picture looks like other pictures, therefore it is a good picture. The sentence looks plausibly like other sentences, therefore it is a good sentence. That this argument is so pervasive tells me only that the audience for 'creative work' is already so inundated with depthless trash, that they can no longer tell the difference between painting and powerlifting.
It is not the artists who are primarily at risk here, but the audience for their work. Artists will continue to disappear for the same reason they always have: because their prospective audience does not understand them.
I would not buy a calculator that hallucinated wrong answers part of the time. Or a microwave oven that told you it grilled the chicken but it didn't and you have to die from Salmonella poisoning.
Obviously if one product hallucinated and one doesn't it's a no brainer (cough Intel FPUs). But in a world where the only calculators were available hallucinated at the 0.5% level you'd probably have one in your pocket still.
And obviously if the calculator hallucinated at the 90% of the time for a task which could otherwise be automated you'd just use that approach.
We teach our kids about microwave oven safety for this reason.
(thanks Rory Sutherland for this analogy)
Being good at coming up with ideas, at critically reading something, at synthesizing research, at writing and editing, are all things that take years to learn. This is not the same as learning the mechanics that a calculator does for you.
In two years, that won't be the case.
Its the same for virtually all other Arts based job. An economy that currently support say 100% of the people now, will at most be able to support 10-30% in a few years time.
> It's ridiculous to think drawing will become a lost art because of LLM/Diffusal
Map reading is pretty much a dead art now (as someone who leads hikes, I've seen it first hand)
Memorising books/oral history is also a long dead art.
Oral story telling is also a dead art, as is folk music, compared to its peak.
Sure _rich_ people will be able to do all the arts they want. Everyone else won't
For example, I have no knowledge of film editing or what “works” in a sequence, but if I wanted to I could create something more than passable with AI.
Why would someone buy a plate off her, when they could get one from IKEA for 1.50 eur?
Yet ceramics is not a dead art. Beats me?
I miss when rich people spent their time appealing to other rich people with art instead of screwing over all of society.
Well, they always did the latter. But they had their circuses as well. Now it's just cold, hard corporatism.
Obesity rates keep "improving" since the car was invented, up to becoming a major public health crisis and the main amplifier of complications and mortality when the pandemic stroke.
Oh, and the 100m sprint world record has been set for more than a decade and a half now, which means either we reached human optimum, or progress on anti-doping technology has forced a regression on performance.
Well you sure showed them.
The TFA makes a very concrete point about how the Whatever machine is categorically different from a calculator or a handsaw. A calculator doesn't sometimes hallucinate a wrong result. A saw doesn't sometimes cut wavy lines instead of straight lines. They are predictable and learnable tools. I don't see anyone addressing this criticism, only straw manning.
A very good example! (...although probably not how you think it is ;)
Indeed the world record is achieved by a very limited number of people under stringent conditions.
Meanwhile people by and large† take their cars to go to the bakery which by foot would be 10min away, to disastrous effect on their health.
And by "cars" I mean "technology", which, while a fantastic enabler of things impossible before, has turned more people into couch potatoes than athletes.
† Comparatively to world record holders.
There are clear differences. First of a calculator and microwave are quite different, but so is LLM. Both are time savers, in the sense of microwave saves time defrosting and calculator saves time calculating vs human.
They save time to achieve a goal. However calculators come with a penalty, by making multiplication easier they make user worse at it.
LLMs are like calculators but worse. They both are effort savers, and thus come with a huge learning penalty and unprecise enough that you need to learn to know better than them.
No it's not (like OP's article says). With a calculator you punch in 10 + 9 and get 2 immediately, and this was 50+ years ago. With an LLM you type in "what is 10 + 9" and get three paragraphs of text after a few seconds. (this is false, I just tried it and the response is "10 + 9 = 19" but I'm exaggerating for dramatic effect). With a microwave you yeet in food and press a button and stuff happens the same way, every time.
Sure, if you abstract it to "doing things in an easier and lazier way", LLMs are just the next step, like IDEs with built in error checking and code generation were since 20 years ago. But it's more vague than press button to do a thing.
Your calculator is broken.
> With an LLM you type in "what is 10 + 9" and get three paragraphs of text after a few seconds. (this is false, I just tried it and the response is "10 + 9 = 19" but I'm exaggerating for dramatic effect).
So you’re arguing against a strawman?
it really isn't. Calculators don't steal from acuators. Actuators and calculators grabbed from nature. Microwaves didn't take from the fireplace.
People really want to pretend that LLM's aren't just storing massive amounts of other people's data with reckless abandon and pretend instead that it's like the car to a horse. Cars didn't need literal horsepower.
>It's ridiculous to think drawing will become a lost art because of LLM/Diffusal models when we live in a reality where powerlifting is a thing.
I agree that athletes are the last thing to be replaced by our robot overlords. If there's one cheatcode to the human element, it's charisma. And people bouncing balls real good is a trillion dollar industry that warps out entire civlization, from forming hobbies, to shaping what we find as "attractive".
That's more of a cultural thing than a practicality thing, though. People respect athletes. They do not apparently respect artists nor engineers, let alone blue collar work that turns out to be way more expensive to automate.
You generally don't need a lengthy explanation because it's common sense. When someone doesn't get it then people have to go into lengthy convoluted explanations because they are trying to elucidate common sense to someone who doesn't get it.
I mean how else do I elucidate it?
LLMs are different from any revolutionary technology that came before it. The first thing is we don't understand it. It's a black box. We understand the learning algorithm that trains the weights, but we don't understand conceptually how an LLM works. They are black boxes and we have limited control over them.
You are talking to a thing that understands what you say to it, yet we don't understand this how this thing works. Nobody in the history of science has created anything similar. And yet we get geniuses like you who can use a simple analogy to reduce the creation of an LLM to something like the invention of a car and think there's utterly no difference.
There is a sort of inflection point here. It hasn't happened yet but a possible future is becoming more tangible. A future where technology surpasses humanity in intelligence. You are talking to something that is talking back and could surpass us.
I know the abundance of AI slop has made everyone numb to the events that happened in the past couple of years. But we need to look past that. Something major has happened, something different then the achievements and milestones humanity has surpassed before.
Maybe you're new here friend...
Perhaps you do not understand it, but many software engineers do understand.
Of the human brain we can still say that we don't understand it.
Wrong.
> You are talking to a thing that understands what you say to it
Wrong.
We go from a society where only a very few people are literate in math to one where everyone has a literal supercomputer at all times. What do you think that would do for math literacy in a society? Would everyone suddenly went to learn algebra and calculus? Or would the vast majority of people use the easy machine and accept its answers without question or understanding?
The industrial revolution automated a lot of blue collars, AI is starting to seriously automate white collars to the point less people are needed.
They are automating the mind, there’s not much else to compete with to provide value. Which color people should pivot to?
At this rate: red.
Even though that is a generalization that you cannot prove, you implicitly admit that it will prevent everybody else from gettings any skills. Which is quite a bad outcome.
> powerlifting is a thing
Those people have a different motivation: looks, competition, prestige, power. That doesn't motivate people to learn to draw.
Your easy dismissal is undoubtedly shared by many, but it is hubris.
I guess the analogy isn't that bad! I'd be pretty upset if a professional cook made my steak in a microwave.
It’s time to move on. The history of tech is a steady march of tools that demand less prep, less precision, and less friction from their users.
All this hand-wringing seems to show is that a worforce whose aggregate work ethos usually mocks “get off my lawn” attitudes in others was hiding a significant “but I never thought it would happen to me”, often couched in some variety of “but think of the children”.
Besides, it could be worse: it’s not like when other professions went obsolete practically overnight, like switchboard operators, or cuirassiers.
We need to learn to make technology truly benefit the many. Also in terms of power.
In terms of the artist being accessible to overseas fans it's a great improvement, but I do wonder if I had grown up with this, would I have had any motivation to learn?
For a specific example, when 2 grammar points seem to mean the same thing, teachers here in Japan would either not explain the difference, or make a confusing explanation in Japanese.
It's still private-ish/only for myself, but I generated all of this with LLMs and using it to learn (I'm around N4~N3) :
- Grammar: https://practice.cards/grammar
- Stories, with audio (takes a bit to load): https://practice.cards/stories
It's true though that you still need the motivation, but there are 2 sides of AI here and just wanted to give the other side.
But my man, how do you know if it explains perfectly well or is just generating plausible-sounding slop? You're learning, so by definition you don't know!
I don't know, I feel like one of the worst things to do on the internet is to miscommunicate. And that can be hard enough with 2 native speakers (I just had a response completly blow up on me because they assumedly took my comment the wrong way).
>but I do wonder if I had grown up with this, would I have had any motivation to learn?
Machine translation has come a long way where I can at least get the general feel of say, a translated article. It is still far from the point where I feel like I can read a machine translated article and not have it come off as clunky. That last 10% or so is just uncanny enough for it to impact my reading experience.
It's killing the accumulative and progressive way of learning that rewards who tries and fail many times before getting it right.
The "learning" is effectively starting to being killed.
I just wonder what would happen to a person after many years using "AI" and suddenly not having access to it. My guess is that you become useless and with a highly diminished capacity to perform even the most basic things by yourself.
This is one of many reasons why I'm so against all the hype that's going on in the "AI" space.
I keep doing things the old school way because I fully comprehend the value of reading real books, trying, failing and repeating the process again and again. There's no other way to truly learn anything.
Does this generation understand the value of it? Will the next one?
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...
Also to the thief that tries to wear it.
Set a few years from now.
The only silver lining I can see is that a new perspective may be forced on how well or badly we’ve facilitated learning, usability, generally navigating pain points and maybe even all the dusty presumptions around the education / vocational / professional-development pipeline.
Before, demand for employment/salary pushed people through. Now, if actual and reliable understanding, expertise and quality is desirable, maybe paying attention to how well the broader system cultivates and can harness these attributes can be of value.
Intuitively though, my feeling is that we’re in some cultural turbulence, likely of a truly historical magnitude, in which nothing can be taken for granted and some “battles” were likely lost long ago when we started down this modern-computing path.
At any point of progress in history you can look backwards and forwards and the world is different.
Before tractors a man with an ox could plough x field in y time. After tractors he can plough much larger areas. The nature of farming changes. (Fewer people needed to farm more land. )
The car arrives, horses leave. Computers arrive, the typing pool goes away. Typing was a skill, now everyone does it and spell checkers hide imperfections.
So yeah LLMs make "drawing easier". Which means just that. Is that good or bad? Well I can't draw the old fashioned way so for me, good.
Cooking used to be hard. Today cooking is easy, and very accessible. More importantly good food (cooked at home or elsewhere) is accessible to a much higher % of the population. Preparing the evening meal no longer starts with "pluck 2 chickens" and grinding a kilo of dried corn.
So yeah, LLMs are here. And yes things will change. Some old jobs will become obsolete. Some new ones will appear. This is normal, it's been happening forever.
If we don't have something better to do we'll all be at home doing nothing. We all need jobs to afford living, and already today many have bullshit jobs. Are we going to a world where 99.9% of the people need a bullshit job just to survive?
With the WWW we thought everyone having access to all information would enlighten them, but without knowledge people do not recognize the right information, and are more likely to trust (mis)information that they think they understand.
What if LLMs give us all the answers that we need to solve all problems, but we are too uninformed and unskilled to recognize these answers? People will turn away from AI, and return to information that they can understand and trust, even if it's false.
Anyway, nothing new actually, we've seen this with science for some time now. It's too advanced for most people to understand and validate, so people distrust it and turn to other sources of information.
Before that, I had an TI-99 4A at home without a tape drive and the family tv as a display. I mainly was into creating games for my friends. I did all my programming on paper, as the "screen time" needed to be maximized for actually playing the games after typing it in from the paper notebook. Believe it or not, but bugs were very rare.
Much later at uni there were computer rooms with Mac's with a floppy drive. You could actually just program at the keyboard, and the IDE even had a debugger!
I remember observing my fellow students endlessly type-run-bug-repeat until it "worked" and thinking "these guys never learned to reason through their program before running it. This is just trial and error. Beginners should start on paper".
Fortunately I immediately caught myself and thought, no, this is genuine progress. Those that "abuse" it would more than likely not have programmed 'ye old way' anyways, and some others will genuinely become very good regardless.
A second thing: in the early home computer year(s) you had to program. The computer just booted into the (most often BASIC) prompt, and there was no network or packaged software. So anyone that got a computer programmed.
Pretty soon, with systems like the Vic-20, C64 and ZX Spectrum there was a huge market in off the shelf game cassettes. These systems became hugely popular because they allowed anyone to play games at home without learning to program. So only those that liked programming did. Did that lose beginner programmers? Maybe some, for sure.
But personally, I don't feel as upset over all this as he does. It seems that all my tech curmudgeonliness over the years is paying off these days, in spades.
Humbly, I suggest that he and many others simply need to disconnect more from The Current Thing or The Popular Thing.
Let's look at what he complains about:
* Bitcoin. Massive hype, never went anywhere. He's totally right. That's why I never used it and barely even read about it. I have no complaints because I don't care. I told myself I'd care if someone ever built something useful with Bitcoin. 10 years later they haven't. I'm going back to bed.
* Windows. Man I'm glad I dodged that bullet and became a Linux user almost 15 years ago. Just do it. Stuff will irk you either way but Linux irks don't make you feel like your dignity as a human being is being violated. Again, he's right that Windows sucks; I just don't have to care, because I walked away.
* Bluesky, Twitter, various dumb things being said on social media. Those bother him too. Fortunately, these products are optional. I haven't logged into my Twitter account for three years. I'll certainly never create a Bluesky one. On some of my devices I straight up block many of these crapo social sites like Reddit etc. in /etc/hosts. I follow some RSS feeds of a few blogs, one of the local timeline for a Mastodon instance. Takes ten minutes and then I go READ BOOKS in my spare time. That's it. He is yet again right, social media sucks, it's the place where you hear about all this dumb stuff like Bitcoin; I just am not reading it.
I'm not trying to toot my own horn here it's just that when you disconnect from all the trash, you never look back, and the frustrations of people who haven't seem a little silly. You can just turn all of this stuff off. Why don't you? Is it an addiction? Treat it like one if so. I used to spend 6 hours a day on my phone and now it's 1 hour, mainly at lunch, because the rest of the time it's on silent, in a bag, or turned off, just like a meth addict trying to quit shouldn't leave meth lying around.
Listen to Stallman. Listen to Doctorow. These guys are right. They were always right. The free alternatives that respect you exist. Just make the leap and use them.
This should be comparable to how much fewer people in the west today know how to work a farm or build machinery. Each technological shift comes at a cost of population competence.
I do have a feeling that this time it could be different. Because this shift has this meta-quality to it. It has never been easier to acquire, at least theoretical, knowledge. But the incentives for learning are shifting in strange directions.
Fair point; I think this feeling is exacerbated by all the social media being full of people looking like they're good at what they do already, but it rarely shows the years of work they put in beforehand. But that's not new, compare with athletes, famous people, fictional characters, etc. There's just more of it and it's on a constant feed.
It does feel like people will just stop trying though. And when there's a shortcut in the form of an LLM, that's easy. I've used ChatGPT to write silly stories or poems a few times; I look at it and think "you know, if I were to sit down with it proper I could've written that myself". But that'd be a time and effort investment, and for a quick gag that will be pushed down the Discord chat within a few minutes anyway, it's not worth it.
IMO, because it's good in a way or another. I'm not reading your writing because I imagine you toiled over every word of it, but simply because I started reading and it seemed worthwhile to read the rest.
Or, to use a different metaphor, these comments are mentally nutritional Doritos, not a nicely prepared restaurant meal. If your restaurant only serves Dorito-level food, I won't go there even if I do consume chips quite often at home.
LLMs will accelerate the pace of this assimilation. New trends and new things will become popular and generic so fast that we'll have to get really inventive to stay ahead of the curve.
The best artists will spot holes in the culture, and present them to us in a way that's expertly composed, artful and meticulously polished. The tools will let them do it faster, and to reach a higher peak of polish than in the past, but the artfulness will still be the artist's.
Futuristic tools aren't replacing art, they're creating a substrate for a higher order of art. Collages are art, and at its most crude, this higher order art reduces to digital collages of high quality generated assets with human intention. With futuristic tools, art becomes reductive rather than constructive. To quote Michelangelo's response to how he made David: "It is simple, I just removed everything that wasn't David"
2 years later and he thought of a project he really wanted to make. He didn't succeed, but its very clear he changes his mind
> up until now, you had no choice and to keep making crappy pictures and playing crappy songs until you actually start to develop a taste for the effort, and a few years later you find yourself actually pretty darn competent at the thing. That's a pretty virtuous cycle.
https://www.deviantart.com/scotchi/art/keep-tryin-690533685
Exactly.
Only putting the work is going to get anyone places. And yes it takes _time_, like, tons, and there's no shortcut.
And I can explain in excruciating detail how to do an ollie or a kickflip even and from a physics point of view you would totally get it but to land the damn thing you simply have to put a shitload of time on the board and fail over and over and over again.
We come from a place where we've been trained as engineers or whatever to do this or that and - somewhat - critically think about things. Instead picture yourself in the shoes of a beginner: how would you, a beginner who has not built their own mental model of discipline $foo, even begin to be critical of AI output?
But we're being advertised magic powder and sweating overalls and whathaveyou that makes you lose weight a) instantly† and b) without going to the gym and well putting in the effort††.
LLMs are the speed diet of the mind.
† comparatively
†† not that putting any arbitrary amount of effort is going to get you places, there _is_ a thing such as wasteful effort; but NOT putting the effort is a solid guarantee that you won't.
I have not yet figured out why anyone would choose this behaviour in a text editor. You have to press something to exit the delimited region anyway, whether that be an arrow key or the closing delimiter, so just… why did the first person even invent the idea, which just complicates things and also makes it harder to model the editor’s behaviour mentally? Were they a hunt-and-peck typist or something?
In theory, it helps keep your source valid syntax more of the time, which may help with syntax highlighting (especially of strings) and LSP/similar tooling. But it’s only more of the time: your source will still be invalid frequently, including when it gets things wrong and you have to relocate a delimiter. In practice, I don’t think it’s useful on that ground.
It's good enough, it gets the job done and does not cause enough friction for the person to feel the need to improve. Complacency.
I'm nowhere near a hiring position but if I was I'd add assessing that to the application procedure.
It feels like this is part of a set of growing issues, with millennials being the only generation in between gen X / boomers and gen Z that have computer skills and can do things like manage files or read a whole paragraph of text without a computer generated voice + RSVP [0] + Subway Surfers gameplay in the background.
But it was also millennials that identified their own quickly diminishing attention spans, during the rise of Twitter, Youtube, Netflix and the like [1].
I want to believe all of this is giving me some job security at least.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_serial_visual_presentati...
[1] https://randsinrepose.com/archives/nadd/ (originally published 2003, updated over time to reference newer trends)
Quite literally laughed out loud at this. I still cannot believe this is a thing people actually do; I thought it was a joke "genre" at first.
If you have to use multiple keyboards, arrows, end, home etc tend to be at different position on the keyboard. Almost no better than using a mouse.
That's were old school vi / emacs shine. CTRL? Always same area, so ctrl-f to go forward? Same gesture whatever brand of a laptop I have to work on.
How is it ever wrong, though? If I insert a (, and then a {, and the editor appends so that it's ({}), that's always ?correct. Can it ever not be.
Maybe because on a Norwegian keyboard { is a bit awkward, but I like it. Then even if we're 5 levels deep with useEffect(() => {(({[{[ I can just press ctrl+shift+enter and it just magically finishes up everything and put my caret at the correct place, instead of me trying to write ]}]})) in the correct order.
Whenever you edit something existing that already has the ), ] or } further down and you end up with a ()), []] or {}}. Or when you select some text that you want to replace and start with a quote only to end up with "the text you wanted to replace" instead of the expected ".
I never notice when it works but get annoyed every time it doesn't, so I feel like it never works and always sucks.
I guess it's muscle memory and some people are used to it, but it feels fundamentally wrong to me to have the editor do different basic editing things based on which character is being pressed.
e.g.:
(a + b > c) -> ((a + b > c) -> (()a + b > c) -> no, I was aiming for ((a + b) > c)
(it sound like you're talking about a different feature/implementation, though, since in the annoying case there's no 'completion' shortcut, it just appears)
I think here you are talking about a different thing -- completion of already started parentheses/"/whatever with content in-between, not the pre-application of paired braces or quotation marks, as the author did, no?
But I agree that in normal input it is often annoying.
Maybe this is just an XKCD moment https://xkcd.com/1172/ ...
This feature is useful for me. So are LLMs. If someone doesn't want to use this or that, they are not obliged to. But don't tell me that features that I find useful "suck".
You can always insert the second " as a ghost(?) character to keep syntax highlighting working. But it's not like any modern language server really struggles with this anyways.
You can perhaps imagine an editor that only inserts the delimiter if you type the start-string symbol in the middle of a line.
Maybe it's like a pale imitation of structural editing? There are editing modes for some editors that more or less ensure the syntax is always valid as you edit, and they of course include this feature.
In my perceived experience, every time a delimiter is opened, it automatically closes, allowing you to move away from it without thinking.
Even in places where this is not available (Slack, comment boxes, etc.), I close the delimiter as soon as I open it
Can't speak to other editors though.. I don't want to sound like I'm trolling, but they generally feel quite clunky, compared to Emacs (ducks, runs ;p )
It's just matching, and reflecting the way different humans think, and reason, that's all.
(yes, said in jest)
Hah, fun about this is that I press exactly the matched symbol ( `}` to `{` , etc) to exit this delimited region and VS even understand what I want! Incredibly useless thing
On a french keyboard, ~#{[|\\^@]} all require the "alt gr" modifier key which is usually just right of the space key. So totally outside the realm of shift, caps lock, ctrl or alt.
I remember when PayPal came to Australia, I was so confused by it as I could just send money via internet banking. Then they tried to lobby the government to make our banking system worse so they could compete, much like Uber.
This is not rhetorical - if you (try to) make the life of literally millions of people worse in a small way, the amount of time and money wasted by them should be calculated and used to determine the punishment.
> I don’t want to help someone who opens with “I don’t know how to do this so I asked ChatGPT and it gave me these 200 lines but it doesn’t work”.
In the same vein, I've actually worked on crypto projects in both DeFi and NFT spaces, and agree with the "money for criminals" joke assessment of crypto, even if the technology is quite fascinating.
The skill has not been obliterated. We still need to fix the slop written by the LLMs, but it is not that bad.
Some people copy and paste snippets of code without knowing what it does, and in a sense, they spread technical debt around.
LLMs lower the technical debt spread by the clueless, to a lower baseline.
The issue I see is that the amount of code having this level of technical debt is created at a much faster speed now.
The copy-paste of usable code snippets is somewhat comparable to any use of a library or framework in the sense that there's an element of not understanding what the entire thing is doing or at least how, and so every time this is done it adds to the knowledge debt, a borrowing of time, energy and understanding needed to come up with the thing being used.
By itself this isn't a problem and realistically it's impossible to avoid, and in a lot of cases you may never get to the point where you have to pay this back. But there's also a limit on the rate of debt accumulation which is how fast you can pull in libraries, code snippets and other abstractions, and as you said LLMs ability to just produce text at a superhuman rate potentially serves to _rapidly_ increase the rate of knowledge debt accumulation.
If debt as an economic force is seen as something that can stimulate short-term growth then there must be an equivalent for knowledge debt, a short-term increase in the ability of a person to create a _thing_ while trading off the long-term understanding of it.
Take this snippet of code, and this is what each part means, and how you can change it.
It doesn't explain how it is implemented, but it explains the syntax and the semantics of it, and that's enough.
Good documentation makes all the difference, at least for me.
I'm SO stealing this!! <3
Yeah? What about what LLMs help with? Do you have no code that could use translation (move code that looks like this to code that looks like that)? LLMs are real good with that, and they save dozens of hours on single sentence prompt tasks, even if you have to review them.
Or is it all bad? I have made $10ks this year alone on what LLMs do, for $10s of dollars of input, but I must understand what I am doing wrong.
Or do you mean, if you are a man with a very big gun, you must understand what that gun can do before you pull the trigger? Can only the trained can pull the trigger?
You don't want more technical debt.
Ideally, you want zero technical debt.
In practice only a hello world program has zero technical debt.
Only bad code, and what takes the time is understanding it, not rewriting it, and the LLM doesn't make that part any quicker.
> they save dozens of hours on single sentence prompt tasks, even if you have to review them
Really? How are you reviewing quicker than you could write? Unless the code is just a pile of verbose whatever, reviewing it is slower than writing it, and a lot less fun too.
No one is becoming a retard omniscient using LLMs and anyone saying they are is lying and pushing a narrative.
Humans still correct things, humans understand systems have flaws, and they can utilize them and correct them.
This is like saying someone used Word's grammar correction feature and accepted all the corrections. It doesn't make sense, and the people pushing the narrative are disingenuous.
That’s a nice description, to be honest.
And thank fuck it happened. All of shell and obscure Unix tools that require brains molded in 80s to use on a day to day basis should’ve been superseded by something user friendly long time ago.
I clicked halfheartedly, started to read halfheartedly, and got sucked into a read that threw me back into the good old days of the internet.
A pity that the micropayments mentioned in the post never materialized, I'd surely throw a few bucks at the author but the only option is a subscription and I hate those.
- there are zero digs of any kind about sexuality in this piece
- the only reference in the text I can possibly find that someone might have considered a "micro-dig at people who are white" is
> This is the driving force behind clickbait, behind thumbnails of white guys making 8O faces, behind red arrows, behind video essayists who just read Wikipedia at you three times a week like clockwork, [...]
To me this feels more like it's identifying a specific thing than a "micro-dig", but opinions may differ.
I'd really like to know why tubgirl spam raids are bad but unicorn weiners are not; I don't really see much difference between the two, TBH.
Edit: I apologies, the author has pre-gpt posts that use em dashes so likely it’s part of their writing style.
Color me naive but honestly I'm pretty sure it's not, though. We all tend to be worse at distinguishing AI from human text than we think, but the text sounds genuine to me and transpires an author with a quirky personality that seems difficult to imitate by an LLM. And that could include using em dashes.
The author lost me a little on the AI rant. Yes, everything and everyone is shoving LLMs into places that I don't want it. Just today Bandcamp sent me an email about upcoming summer albums that was clearly in part written by AI. You can't get away from it, it's awful. That being said, the tooling for software development is so powerful that I feel like I'd be crazy not to use it. I save so so much time with banal programming tasks by just writing up a paragraph to cursor about what I want and how I want it done.
And I'm not the only one saying this but - the bit about LLMs is likely throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Yes the "AI-ification" of everything is horrible and people are shoehorning it into places where it's not useful. But to say that every single LLM interaction is wrong/not useful is just not true (though it might be true if you limit yourself to only freely available models!). Using LLMs effectively is a skill in itself, and not one to be underestimated. Just because you failed to get it to do something it's not well-suited to doesn't mean it can't do anything at all.
Though the conclusion (do things, make things) I do agree with anyway.
We live in a world now where people scare one another into making significant choices with limited information. Person A claims it's the future you don't want to miss, Person B takes that at face value and starts figuring out how to get in on the scam, and Person C looks at A and B and says "me too." Rinse and repeat.
That's why so much of the AI world is just the same app with a different name. I'd imagine a high percentage of the people involved in these projects don't really care about what they're working on, just that it promises to score them more money and influence (or so they think).
So in a way, for the majority, it is just stupid and greedy behavior, but perhaps less conscious.
I have a feeling that line of thinking is going to be of diminishing consolation as the world veers further into systemic and environmental collapse.
I think it is defense mechanism, you see it everywhere, and you have to wonder, "why are people thinking this way?".
I think those with an ethical or related argument deserve to be heard, but opposite of that, it seems like full blinders, ignoring the reality presented before us.
> And the only real hope I have here is that someday, maybe, Bitcoin will be a currency, and circulating money around won’t be the exclusive purview of Froot Loops. Christ
PLEASE NO. The only thing this will lead to is people who didn't get rich with this scheme funding the returns of people who bought in early.
Whatever BTC becomes, everyone who advocates for funneling public money of people who actually work for their salary into Bitcoin is a fraud.
I don't think the blog author actually wants this, but vaguely calling for Bitcoin to become "real money" indirectly will contribute to this bailout.
And yes, I'm well aware that funneling pension funds money etc into this pyramid scheme is already underway. Any politician or bank who supports this should be sued if you ask me.
Why is that? You can just buy 0.00000001 BTC.
He wants normal banking and money transfer... but just to anybody, and for any reason. As an example, he'd like people to be able to pay him to draw bespoke furry porn for them. Or as another example, why can't a US citizen pay an Iranian citizen to do some work for them? (e.g. write a computer program)
That is totally possible. The only thing that stands in his way, and drives him into the arms of the cryptocurrency frauds, are moralising and realpolitiking governments that intentionally use their control of banks to control what bank customers can do with their money.
In an ideal world, government would only regulate banks on fiscal propriety and fair-dealing, and would not get in the way of consenting adults exchanging money for goods and services. But because government does fuck with banks, and sometimes the banks just do the fuckery anyway and government doesn't compel them to offer services to all (e.g. Visa/Mastercard refuse to allow porn merchants?), normal people start listening to the libertarians, the sovereign citizens, and the pump-and-dump fraudsters hyping cryptocurrencies.
He wants decentralised digital cash. How can it be done, if not Bitcoin et al?
Also, I'm not sure if a radical lack of regulation / full decentralization is a good thing when we are talking about money.
In my opinion, money should be regulated by governments.
But this discussion tends to escalate and the arguments have been made ad nauseam, so I'm tuning out here, sorry.
If you were to create a decentralized and limited supply currency, how would you distribute it so that it's “fair”?
Sounds a bit like if the world was running only on proprietary software created by Microsoft and you criticized the move to open source because that would enrich Linus Torvalds and other code creators/early adopters.
Are people better off by continuing to use centralized broken software that they have to pay a subscription for (inflation) than if they did a lump sum buy of a GNU/Linux distro copy from a random guy and become liberated for the rest of their life?
Yes that is actually roughly the take away here. LLMs are getting so popular in programming not because they are good at solving problems but because they are good at reproducing a solution to some minor variation of an existing problem which has already been solved many times.
Most of the work that most of the industry does is just re-solving the same set of problems. This is not just because of NIH but also because code reuse is a hard problem.
This is not to say that everything is the same product. The set or problems you solve and how you chain those solutions together (the overarching architecture) as well as the small set of unique problems you solve are the real value in a product. But its often not the majority of any single codebase.
Yes. Most developers in the corporate world are building CRUD apps that are 90% boilerplate. Hopefully this helps explain the disconnect.
And even if GenAI progress stops here and it never gets better, it's incredibly useful. Why do people realize that it can't do EVERYTHING and then get stuck to the view that they can't use it for ANYTHING, confused as to why others are getting benefit from it?
Two things can be true (and I believe they are): the hype can be "staggeringly overblown" AND it can still be useful in many cases.
You're a platform drone, you have no mind, yada. Yet, we are reading the author's blog.
The author may hate LLMs, but they will lead to many people realizing things they never were aware of, like the author's superficial ability to take information and present it in a way that engages others. Soon that will be a thing that is known. Not many will make money sharing information in prose.
What the author refers to as "LLMs" today, will continually improve and "get better" at everything the author has issues with, maybe in novel ways we can't think of at the moment.
Alternative take:
"Popular culture" has always been a "lesser" ideal of experience, and now that ontological grouping now includes the Internet, as a whole. There are no safe corners, everything you experience on the Internet, if someone shared it with you, is now "Popular culture".
Everyone knows what you know, and you are no longer special or have special things to share, because awareness is ubiquitous.
This is good for society in many ways.
For example, with information asymmetry, where assholes made others their food, it will become less common that people are food.
Things like ad-driven social networks will fade away as this realization becomes normalized.
Unfortunately, we are at the very early stages of this, and it takes a very long time for people to become aware of things like hoaxes.
-----
This is why I absolutely cannot fucking stand creative work being referred to as "content". "Content" is how you refer to the stuff on a website when you're designing the layout and don't know what actually goes on the page yet. "Content" is how you refer to the collection of odds and ends in your car's trunk. "Content" is what marketers call the stuff that goes around the ads.
"Content"... is Whatever.
-----
People, please don't think of yourself as "content consumers".
The point of doing things is the act of doing them, not the result. And if we make the result easily obtainable by using an LLM then this gets reinforced not destroyed.
I'm going to use sketching as an example, because it's something I enjoy but am very bad at. But you could talk in the same way about playing a musical instrument, writing code, writing anything really, knitting, sports, anything.
I derive inspiration from other people who can sketch really well, and I enjoy and admire their ability. But I'm happy that I will never be that good. The point of sketching (for me) is not to produce a fantastic drawing. The point is threefold: firstly to really look at the world, and secondly to practice a difficult skill, and thirdly the meditative time of being fully absorbed in a creative act.
I like that the fact that LLMs remove the false idea that the point of this is to produce Art. The LLM can almost certainly produce better Art than I can. Which is great because the point of sketching, for me, is the process not the result, and having the result be almost completely useless helps make that point. It also helps that I'm really bad at sketching, so I never want to hang the result on my wall anyway.
I understand that if you're really good at something, and take pride in the result of that, and enjoy the admiration of others at your accomplishments, then this might suck. That's gotta be tough. But if you only ever did it for the results and admiration, then maybe find something that you actually enjoy doing?
For art/craft you are completely correct though.
You said: how many letters are in the lithuanian word "nebeprisikaspinaudamas"? Just give me one number. ChatGPT said: 23
You said: how many letters are in the lithuanian word 'nebeprisikaspinaudamas'. Just give me one number. ChatGPT said: 21
Both are incorrect by the way. It's 22
I've found that they get pretty wishy-washy when you correct them. As an example, yesterday I was working on porting a function from the open-source CUE4Parse project from C# to Python (for a hobby project), and the LLM (Gemini 2.5 Pro) suggested the following translation of a C# method:
@staticmethod
def from_name(name: str) -> 'FPackageId':
# C# Encoding.Unicode is UTF-16 LE in Python
lower_name_bytes = name.lower().encode('utf-16-le')
hashed_id = CityHash64(lower_name_bytes)
return FPackageId(hashed_id)
> This custom ToLower(), does that produce the same result as .lower() in Python?
Gemini answered with a lot of text and concluded: "You should use Python's standard lower() method for your port."
I pushed back with:
> Right, but for this to work (looking up an asset by its hash as contained in global.utoc), I probably have to match the behavior of Unreal Engine...
Gemini: You are absolutely right. My apologies, your insight is spot on. For the purpose of matching hashes that are pre-calculated by Unreal Engine and stored in files like `global.utoc`, you **must** replicate the engine's behavior exactly. My previous advice to use Python's `.lower()` was incorrect in this specific context.
You need to implement a function that behaves identically to the C# `ToLower` you highlighted. The engine uses this specific, non-Unicode-aware, ASCII-only lowercasing function before hashing the path to generate the `FPackageId`. Using Python's standard `.lower()` would produce a different byte sequence for any path containing non-English characters, leading to a hash mismatch.
Also, more importantly, they will ignore negative directives. So telling it: "don't do X" , will get ignored. You are better of using positive directives instead.
But, to make a comparison here with Claude Code, I was initially impressed with Geminis ability to hold a keep a conversation on track, but it rarely gets the hint when I express annoyance with its output. Claude has an uncanny ability to guess what I find wrong with its output (even when I just respond with WTF!) and will try to fix it often in actually useful ways, Gemini just keeps repeating its last output after acknowledging my annoyance.
But that's not what the marketing says. The marketing says it will do your entire job for you.
In reality, it will save you some typing if you already know what to do.
On HN at least, where most people are startup/hustle culture and experts in something, they don't think long term enough to see the consequences for non experts.
This goes too far in the other direction. LLMs can do far more than merely saving you typing. I have successfully used coding agents to implement code which at the outset I had no business writing as it was far outside my domain expertise. By the end I'd gained enough understanding to be able to review the output and guide the LLM towards a correct solution, far faster than the weeks or months it would have taken to acquire enough background info to make an attempt at coding it myself.
In the past ten years, I worked with one guy from Nigeria and a bunch of people from Iran. Bitcoin (or rather cryptocurrencies in general) have been more than just mere gimmicks.
Sending money from one side of the world to another, for such a low fees, even when the central bank of Nigeria is blocking USD transfers, even when bank transfers to Iran are being blocked, has been very useful in itself.
As for AI, yes if you use it as a God, you will be disappointed. Yes it can’t do everything. Yes it will hallucinate.
But it’s been a great learning environment for me, I keep asking questions to get an overview of things.
I used to learn concepts such as « clean architecture » because AI is never tired, it can provide endless variations to the same problems, until you better understand the underlying principles and the recurring patterns.
When I work on a project, 20-30% is creative, cutting edge, never seen before. 70% is CRUD, necessary boilerplate.
I know what I am supposed to be doing, I can verify the result, double check the validity of it.
Why would I waste hours typing letters?
Do I rely on AI for everything? No I don’t.
But pretending it’s completely useless, is nonsensical.
Yes it’s just statistically inferring the next token, but it’s actually a very simple, powerful concept.
Then it became hip, and people would hand-roll machine-specific assembly code. Later on, it became too onerous when CPU architecture started to change faster than programmers could churn out code. So we came up with compilers, and people started coding at a higher level of abstraction. No one lamented the lost art of assembly.
Coding is just a means to an end. We’ve always searched for better and easier ways to convince the rocks to do something for us. LLMs will probably let us jump another abstraction level higher.
I too spent hours looking for the right PHP or Perl snippet in the early days to do something. My hard-earned bash-fu is mostly useless now. Am I sad about it? Nah. Writing bash always sucked, who am I kidding. Also, regex. I never learned it properly. It doesn’t appeal to me. So I’m glad these whatever machines are helping me do this grunt work.
There are sides of programming I like, and implementation isn’t one of them. Once upon a time I could care less about the binary streams ticking the CPU. Now I’m excited about the probable prospect of not having to think as much about “higher-level” code and jumping even higher.
To me, programming is more like science than art. Science doesn’t care how much profundity we find in the process. It moves on to the next thing for progress.
AI at the current state in my workflow is a decent search engine and stackoverflow. But it has far greater pitfalls as OP pointed out (it just assumes the code is always 100% accurate and will “fake” API).
I only use AI for small problems rather than let it orchestrate entire files.
Like the author, I'm mystified by those who accept the appearance of output as a valid goal.
Even with constrained algorithmic "AI" like Stockfish, which, unlike LLMs, actually works, chess players frown heavily on using it for cheating. No chess player can go to a tournament and say: "I made this game with Stockfish."
The reason behind banning adult materials has to do with Puritanism and with the high rates of refunds on adult websites.
Momentum. They are the big games in town because so many people use them, so many people use them because they are the big games in town. There was a time for both when they didn't suck as much as they do now, at least relative to what other options existed.
Yet, the payment processors will all reliably treat anything NSFW equally by suppressing it as much as they can. From banning individuals who dare do transactions they don't approve of to directly pressuring websites that might tolerate NSFW content by threatening to take away their only means of making money. If they only cared about refunds and profitability, they wouldn't ban individual artists - because the fact how these artists often manage to stay undetected for years suggests that many of their customers aren't the kind to start complaining.
It's quite fascinating how this is the one area where the companies are willing to "self-regulate". They don't process sales of illicit drugs because the governments above them said no and put in extensive guardrails to make these illegal uses as difficult as reasonably possible. Yet, despite most first-world governments not taking issue with adult content at large (for now), the payment processors will act on their own and diligently turn away any potential revenue they could be collecting.
I can absolutely relate. That was ten years ago, so I'm not exactly sure where they are, now, but they still seem to be going strong.
[0] https://eev.ee/blog/2015/06/09/i-quit-the-tech-industry/
> Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.
The reaction to that post has been interesting. It's mainly intended to be an argument against the LLM hype! I'm pushing back against all the people who are saying "LLMs are so incredible at programming that nobody should consider programming as a career any more" - I think that's total nonsense, like a carpenter quitting because someone invented the table saw.
Analogies like this will inevitably get people hung up on the details of the analogy though. Lots of people jumped straight to "a table saw does a single job reliably, unlike LLMs which are non-deterministic".
I picked table saws because they are actually really dangerous and can cut your thumb off if you don't know how to use them.
You were not, as is patently obvious from the sentence preceding your quote (emphasis mine):
> Another Bluesky quip I saw earlier today, and the reason I picked up writing this post (which I’d started last week)
The post had already been started, your comment was simply a reason to continue writing it at that point in time. Had your comment not existed, this post would probably still have been finished (though perhaps at a later date).
> It's mainly intended to be an argument against the LLM hype! I'm pushing back against all the people who are saying "LLMs are so incredible at programming that nobody should consider programming as a career any more" - I think that's total nonsense, like a carpenter quitting because someone invented the table saw.
Despite your restating, your point still reads to me as the opposite as what you claim to have intended. Inventing the table saw is a poor analogy because the problem with the LLM hype has nothing to do with their invention. It’s the grifts and the irresponsible shoving of it down everyone’s throats that’s a problem. That’s why the comparison fails, you’re juxtaposing things which aren’t even slightly related. The invention of a technology and the hype around it are two entirely orthogonal matters.
> Looks like I was the inspiration for this post then
I replace that with:
> Looks like I was the inspiration for finishing this post then
And this:
> Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.
I can rephrase as:
> Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the introduction of the table saw.
People are talking about the trendline, what AI was 5 years ago versus what AI is today points to a different AI 5 years down the line. Whatever AI will be 5 years from now it is immensely possible that LLMs may eliminate programming as a career. If not 5 years... give it 10. If not 10, give it 15. Maybe it happens in a day, a major break through in AI, or maybe it will be like what's currently happening, slow erosion and infiltration into our daily tasks where it takes on more and more responsibilities until one day, it's doing everything.
I mean do I even have to state the above? We all know it. What's baffling to me is how I get people saying shit like this:
>"LLMs are so incredible at programming that nobody should consider programming as a career any more" - I think that's total nonsense, like a carpenter quitting because someone invented the table saw.
I mean it's an obvious complete misrepresentation. People are talking about the future. Not the status quo and we ALL know this yet we still make comments like that.
Using LLMs as part of my process helps me understand how much of my job isn't just bashing out code.
My job is to identify problems that can be solved with code, then solve them, then verify that the solution works and has actually addressed the problem.
An even more advanced LLM may eventually be able to completely handle the middle piece. It can help with the first and last pieces, but only when operated by someone who understands both the problems to be solved and how to interact with the LLM to help solve them.
No matter how good these things get, they will still need someone to find problems for them to solve, define those problems and confirm that they are solved. That's a job - one that other humans will be happy to outsource to an expert practitioner.
It's also about 80% of what I do as a software developer already.
Through no fault of their own, but they're literally blind. They don't have eyes to see, ears to hear or fingers to touch and feel & have no clue if what they've produced is any good to the original purpose. They are still only (amazing) tools.
Private Equity & Financialization: Whatever for business Flood the Zone & Deadcatting: "Whatever" for politics
It's what I think about when I hear all of the "AI is going to eliminate all the jobs." That's just a convenient cover story for "Tax laws changed so R&D isn't free money anymore, and we need to fire everyone."
When almost every drop of wealth is in the control of a tiny number of people, it's not surprising that the world turns into one big competition for ways to convince those people that you have a way for them to sop up the remaining thimbleful too.
> There are people who use these, apparently. And it just feels so… depressing. There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge that vaguely resembles it. That isn’t programming, though. That’s management, a fairly different job. I’m not interested in managing. I’m certainly not interested in managing this bizarre polite lying daydream machine. It feels like a vizier who has definitely been spending some time plotting my demise.
I was several minutes of reading before this paragraph when the idea hit me that this person hates managing. Because everyone I’ve met who hates using AI to produce software describes to me problems like the AI not being correct or lying to them if the model thought that would please you better, and that’s my experience with junior engineers as a manager.
And everyone I’ve met who loves AI at some point makes an analogy to it, that compares it to a team of eager juniors who can do a lot of work fast but can’t have their output trusted blindly, and that’s my experience with junior engineers as a manager.
And then anyone whose been trying to get an Engineering manager job over the past few months and tracking their applications metadata has seen the number of open postings for their requirements go down month after month unless you drop the manager part and keep all the same criteria but as IC
And then I read commentary from megacorps about their layoffs and read between the lines like here[1]
>… a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement, adding that the company is reducing managerial layers …
I think our general consternation around this is coming from creators being forced into management instead of being able to outsource those tasks to their own managers.
I am not really sure what to do with this insight
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/02/tech/microsoft-layoffs-9000-e...
Legitimately I think you are missing my point. What I quoted out of your response could be applied to prompt engineering/managment/tinkering. I think everyone who likes doing this with juniors and hates it with AI is conflating their enjoyment of teaching juniors with the dopamine you get from engaging with other primates.
I think most people I’ve met who hated AI would have the same level of hate for a situation where their boss made them actually manage an underperforming employee instead of letting them continue on as is ad infinitum.
It’s hard work both mentally and emotionally to correct an independent agent well enough to improve their behavior but not strongly enough to break them, and I think most AI haters are choking on this fact.
I’m saying that from the position of an engineer who got into management and choked on the fact that sometimes upper leadership was right and the employee complaining to me about the “stupid rules” or trying to lie to me to get a gold star instead of a bronze one was the agent in the system who was actually at fault
Oh wow.
I'm a bit annoyed with LLMs for coding, because I care about the craft. But I understand the premise of using them when the end goal is not "tech as a craft" but "tech as a means". But that still requires having some reason to use the tech.
Hell, I feel the "tech as a means to get money" part for people trying to climb up the social ladder.
But for a lot of people who already did get to the top of it?
At some point we gotta ask what the point of SEO-optimizing everything even is.
Like, is the end goal optimizing life out of life?
Why not write a whole app using LLMs? Why not have the LLM do your course work? Why do the course work at all? Why not have the LLM make a birthday card for your partner? Why even get up in the morning? Why not just go leave and live in a forest? Why live at all?
What is even the point?
But yeah, first we'll go through a few (?) years of the self-defeating "ChatGPT does my homework" and the necessary adjustments of how schools/unis function.
And also, how is personalized bullshit better than generic bullshit? We'd need to solve the bullshit problem in the first place, which is mathematically guaranteed NOT to be possible with these types of architectures.
As far as I understand, bitcoin is fundamentally unusable as a currency. Transactions are expensive and limited to ?7k? every few seconds. It's also inherently deflationary, you want inflationary currency, you want people spending, not hoarding.
Immutable distributed ledgers, by contrast, have found no use cases other than crime and financial speculation in coming up on twenty years. Exactly how long do we have to wait for these interesting uses that are “surely” coming?
A third of the world is unbanked. A permissionless monetary system makes a huge difference for those.
When I was still very skeptical about Bitcoin, I met a guy in Turkey who was from a very poor African country and was just studying there. His father would buy Bitcoin in their home country with the local currency (P2P) and send it to his son, that would then convert it also P2P for Turkish Liras. They could do this securely an within minutes. The alternative was using Western Union and paying taxes in both countries, which in total added up to ~50% of the sent amount.
It's great not needing Bitcoin, as it is great not needing Tor. But that doesn't mean there's no use case for them.
“list them”
“oh I can do that in this other convoluted way that doesnt solve any of these users goals or problems”
“I’m not the target audience for that so it doesnt count”
“ah so financial speculation, that doesnt count despite being the largest application and sector on the planet”
“marketcap doesnt matter and isnt indicative of anything in that economy, I would rather hold digital assets at a separate different standard than every other asset on the planet out of total ignorance that my same arguments apply to asset classes that I respect”
“see I proved my point for myself, there is no use case after 17 years, classic HN”
“those are strawman arguments despite all conversations following this same predictable path enough for any language model to regurgitate it verbatim”
This drives me mad in JetBrains' products mostly because there are about 14 ways to completely disable it (including Rider, which is different to the others). There should be a single toggle for "Disable all 'smart' completions"
That seems snarky ("you don't want to learn things") when the reality is that the problem, the finite ressource that is the bottleneck, is _time_.
This is also why hyperlinks are underused: few people go through every single one of the words in their last post to try to add appropriate hyperlinks.
Monero is what Bitcoin should have been.
Just because you failed to use an LLM effectively the first time, or it doesn't live up to your version of the hype doesn't mean you have a magic window into how sh1t they are. Many people who use them regularly know just how bad they are and what it's like to move beyond the original context window length. But having auto complete on steroids is still the best thing with regards to making computing "fun" again in a generation. No more boiler plate, no more beating your head against a desk looking for that minor coding bug that could have been fixed by a awesome regex if only you had the time to learn it. No more having to break your stride and go through about 20 websites with popups to find that someone else solved the problem got you, just getting on with stuff and having fun whilst doing it.
Edit: no retort, just flagging and down-voting... lovely
1. Computers could be more fun if you could buy things more easily. Crypto could solve that, but the people involved don't care about crypto, they care about Whatever.
2. Computers can be fun when people do cool things on them. The web could make that possible, but unfortunately the economics of ads incentivize people to post Whatever.
3. Programming can be fun, but LLMs just generate Whatever.
one of these things is not like the other
I agree with the author, I usually do not care how exactly the fetch call looks like. Whatever indeed.
Values at times seem like a property of an extinct subspecies. Like being born with a tail.
Agree with the sense that we're at a weird moment though.
Same with AI. I'm notably more autistic (or more aspie, or whatever) than my friend group, and also I much more easily recognize AI text and images as uncanny slop, while my friends are more easily wowed by it. Maybe AI output has the same "superficially impressive but empty inside" quality as the stuff that sociopaths say.
But chatgpt does help me work through some really difficult mathematical equations in newest research papers by adding intermediate steps. I can easily confirm when it gets them right and when not, as I do have some idea. It’s super useful.
If you are not able to make LLMs work for you at all, and complain about them on the internet, you are an old man yelling at clouds. The blog post devolves from an insightful viewpoint into a long sad ramble.
It’s 100% fine if you don’t want to use them yourself, but complaining to others gets tired quick.
Most of Internet is crap. Most of media is crap. This does need to stop you (or me) from creating.
The irony of this rant next to the AI rant.
Progress is not uniformly distributed I guess.
But I disagree on LLMs being "worse than useless".
Sure, "vibe coding" an entire app from a short prompt will always give you fragile, subtly broken nonsense. *Code is the spec*. In most cases, you can't meaningfully "compress" your requirements into a short informal prompt. We need better formal languages for expressing requirements concisely and declaratively! Think: Prolog, Haskell...
LLMs are good at small tasks that you can review much quicker than doing it yourself. Something tedious, like doing some local refactoring, writing ad-hoc Bash scripts, SQL queries, FFmpeg commands. I use Bash and SQL regularly, but somehow I always have to google the exact syntax. I already use ShellCheck, by the way. It's a must, and it helps a lot when reviewing LLM output.
I like the autocomplete feature too. It often saves time when writing repetitive or obvious code. `if bad_stuff {` usually autocompletes `return Err(BadStuff)` for me. `MyStruct {` initializer usually autocompletes the list of fields for me. I know that incorrect suggestions piss off some people and make it a net-negative for them. Incorrect suggestions are common, but they don't bother me in practice.
UPDATE: I've turned this comment into a blog post. https://home.expurple.me/posts/my-take-on-llms-for-coding/
> But yes, thanks: I was once offered this challenge when faced with a Ren’Py problem, so I grit my teeth and posed my question to some LLM. It confidently listed several related formatting tags that would solve my problem. One teeny tiny issue: those tags did not and had never existed. Just about anything might be plausible! It can just generate Whatever! I cannot stress enough that this is worse than useless to me.
The probabilistic machine generated a probabilistic answer. Unable to figure out a use for the probabilistic machine in two tries, I threw it into the garbage.
Unfortunately, humans are also probabilistic machines. Despite speaking English for nearly a lifetime, errors are constantly produced by my finger-based output streams. So I'm okay talking to the machine that might be wrong in addition to the human that might be wrong.
> It feels like the same attitude that happened with Bitcoin, the same smug nose-wrinkling contempt. Bitcoin is the future. It’ll replace the dollar by 2020. You’re gonna be left behind. Enjoy being poor.
I mean, you were left behind. I was left behind. I am not enjoying being poor. Most of us were left behind. If we invested in Bitcoin like it was the future in 2011 we'd all be surfing around on yachts right now given the current valuation.
The last line of the article summarizes it perfectly.:
> Do things. Make things. And then put them on your website so I can see them.
I subscribe fully to the first two sentences, but the last one is bullshit. The gloom in the article is born from the authors attaching the value of "making things" to the recognition received for the effort. Put your stuff out there if you think it is of value to someone else. If it is, cool, and if it's not, well, who cares.
> I can’t remember exactly what they said, but it was something like: “I created a whole album, complete with album art, in 3.5 hours. Why wouldn’t I use the make it easier machine?” This is kind of darkly fascinating to me, because it gives rise to such an obvious question: if anyone can do that, then why listen to your music? It takes a significant chunk of 3.5 hours just to listen to an album, so how much manual work was even done here? Apparently I can just go generate an endless stream of stuff of the same quality! Why would I want your particular brand of Whatever?
This gem implies that the value of the music (or art in general) is partially or even wholly dependent on whether or not someone else thinks it's good. I can't even...
If you eliminate the back-patting requirements, and the stuff we make is genuine, then it's value is intrinsic. The "Whatever" machines are just tools, like the rest of the tools we use, to make things. So, just make your things and get on with it.
I had an interesting discussion with a piano teacher once. Some of his students, he told me, would play for themselves but never for any kind of audience. As the saying goes: if a musician plays a piano in a closed room with no one to hear it, does it make a sound?
Obviously there's nothing wrong with extremely personal art that never gets released to the wider public - not every personal diary should be a blog. But there's also the question of what happens to art when none of it gets shared around, and vibrant art communities are, in my opinion (and I think also the author's), something to encourage.
hmmm
But he did invent JavaScript ...
Do you realize how many person-hour of highly intelligent people have been spent on ORM just so people could not learn SQL? Most people don't value learning.
Brenden Eich's beliefs about marriage aren't relevant. It been what well over a decade since he was ousted from Mozilla? Wasn't that enough? People constantly bring this up as a reason why you shouldn't use Brave. There are valid reasons not to use Brave Browser. Brendan Eich's beliefs about marriage isn't one of them. It some tired old jab at Eich who like most older people have beliefs that are considered backwards by today's standards.
> This is starting to get away from the main thesis of Whatever but every time I hear about students coasting through school just using LLMs, I wonder what we are doing to humanity’s ability to think critically about anything. It already wasn’t great, but now we’re raising a whole generation on a machine that gives them Whatever, and they just take it. You’ve seen anecdotes of people posting comments and submitting papers and whatnot with obvious tells like “As a large language model…” in them. That means they aren’t even reading the words they claim as their own! They just produce Whatever.
People were cut and pasting Wikipedia articles into University work and doing zero effort back in the mid-2000s while I was in University. There is a deeper problem with education generally and it isn't people copying stuff with AI.
> The most obnoxious people like to talk about how Stable Diffusion is “democratizing art” and that is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. There is no fucking King of Art decreeing who is allowed to draw and who isn’t. You could do it. You could do it right now. But it’s hard, so you’d rather spend that time crying on Twitter about how unfair it is that learning a skill takes work and thank god the computer can give you all of the admiration with none of the effort now.
This isn't what is meant when people say this.
What people typically mean is that people can cheaply create things in the AI that match what they have in their head.
e.g.
- There are parody songs / music videos made for internet streams I watch by other fans of the show. In the past people used to cheaply copy and paste stuff into a video editor and crudely animate it and they weren't great. I literally laughed a parody song that was done like a sea shanty that mocked a well known e-celeb.
- I make cheesy YouTube Thumbnails for my videos because I have zero budget for an artist and my skills with image editing software isn't stellar. I can use the AI to generate me some of the thumbnail and the rest I can do in GIMP. I get something that looks better than if I didn't have the AI IMO. This does democratise it, because I don't have to spend literally hundreds on a graphic designer.
- AI can help with animations. A friend of mind could take a 20 FPS animation and have the AI interpolate the animations accordingly. He has told me this saves him a huge amount of time.
> Why would someone using a really cool tool that makes them more productive… feel compelled to sneer and get defensive at the mere suggestion that someone else isn’t doing the same?
It sounds like it is about people seeing others doing things in a way they view as inefficient or wrong, and then trying to help. "Sneer and get defensive" does not sound like trying to be helpful, but they probably would not describe themselves as sneering and getting defensive, either.
> I might have strong opinions about what code looks like, because I might have to read it, but why would I — why would anyone — have such an intense reaction to the hypothetical editor setup of a hypothetical stranger?
As above, but even closer to this particular question, see the editor war.
> But the Bitcoin people make more money if they can shame everyone else into buying more Bitcoin, so of course they’re gonna try to do it. What do programmers get out of this?
Apart from "helping" others, a benefit of promoting technologies one uses and prefers may be a wider user base, leading to a better support, proliferation of technologies they view as good and useful.
> We’ve never had a machine that can take almost any input and just do Whatever.
Well, there is Perl. It is a joke (the statement, not the language), but the previous points actually made me to think of programming languages with dynamic and weak typing, similarly allowing to pretend that some errors do not happen, at the cost of being less correct, and doing whatever when things go wrong. Ambiguities in natural languages come to mind, too.
> That means they aren’t even reading the words they claim as their own!
Both homework and online discussions featured that before LLMs, too. For instance, with people sometimes linking (not necessarily copying) materials to prove a point, but materials contradicting it. Carelessness, laziness, lack of motivation to spend time and effort, are all old things.
> I can’t imagine publishing a game with, say, Midjourney-generated art, even if it didn’t have uncanny otherworldly surfaces bleeding into each other. I would find that humiliating. But there are games on the Switch shop that do it.
I heard "AI-generated game" mentioned as a curiosity or a novelty, apparently making it a selling point. Same as with all the "AI-powered" stuff, before LLMs. There is much of that used for marketing: as block chaining and "big data" were added everywhere when those were hyped, and many silly things are similarly added into items outside of computing if they have a potential to sound cool at least to some (e.g., fad diets, audiophile hardware).
> But I think the core of what pisses me off is that selling this magic machine requires selling the idea that doing things is worthless.
This also sounds like yet another point in the clash between prevalent business requirements and more enthusiastic human aspirations. The economic and social systems, and cultures, probably have more to do with it than particular technologies. Pretty much any bureaucracy/corporate/enterprise-focused technologies tend to lessen the fun and enjoyment.
The bigger picture that I think too few people focus on is the desperation of it all. The slop machine is just the latest in tech's desperate attempt to recapture what they did in the 90's where they connected a chunk of the planet to the fucking internet at large. Of course, they forget the part where "buying pet food on the internet" doesn't mean we want to be in Zuckerberg's legless dystopic "metaverse" for fucking standup meetings. Even when we had SecondLife 20 years earlier (and I guess VRchat and friends today)
I think the only people that really know this are Nvidia and AMD. The same way the only people who made money in the California gold rush were the people selling pickaxes and supplies and all that. Nvidia's stock price soaring to the size of half the fucking planet like Nortel or Standard Oil before them.
But the dogfooding, good god the dogfooding that is already going on. It feels like that the majority of people have either resoundingly rejected using the slop machine, or, much more troubling for capital. Their uses of it simply aren't "profitable". In the same way that having a speaker on your kitchen counter you can ask "what's the weather today" doesn't actually make you any money but we're going to pretend because we manufactured billions of these fuckers and if we just grin and pretend the musical chairs won't stop just yet. Right? Right?
So you've got an unprofitable product that you dumped hundreds of billions of dollars into. The only thing you can do to stave off your own demise as a C-suite (for making the line not go up. Or, heaven forbid making the line go down) is to feed one end of your workforce into a woodchipper and shackle the remainder of them to the slop machine you bought by installing it on all their desks and demanding they use it so you can pretend your workforce is some order of magnitude more productive now. If you as a C-suite (somehow) come from a tech background you might even know, deep down. Where you push all those feelings down into that it's all a lie, a farce. A distraction for the forces of capital that are even bigger than you are. Unless you're someone like Intel and they push you out the door for not making the line go up fast enough, of course.
But the question I keep coming back to is if there'll ever be a point of reckoning. When does this money black hole escape confinement and suck all the players into oblivion with it? That's been the historic reality of everything from tulips to houses. Or has tech found a way to truly become so inescapable, so irredeemably beyond understanding that they've escaped financial reality for their own mistakes?
Oh come on. As someone who works with plenty of entrepeneurs, you don't get much more enthusiasm from anyone about what they are doing than them, who care about it as much. It's up there with professional sports and professional artists.
Just because things didn't get built that were the absolute dream of what things could be, doesn't mean people didn't care and didn't put in all their efforts to build things. Just because they didn't meet this couch critic's expectations doesn't mean people didn't put the effort in.
I really don't like this attitude. He's really unhappy about paypal and stripe existing? What exactly is the alternative? What alternate universe are they dreaming about? Perfection doesn't exist.
They're unhappy that something better doesn't exist, and that the dream of cryptocurrencies, that they would actually become a useful technology for everyday movement of money, has essentially been killed and buried by the sheer quantity of grift in the ecosystem (to be fair, there's a lot of fundamental technology issues that make that a difficult dream to achieve in practice, but it's sad that it basically doesn't seem to get much at all of the substantial resources poured into the ecosystem, and the general stench of it now makes legitimate use so much harder. So many people associate crypto == scam that adoption for real payments has actively gone backwards since the first few years).
You do you, and I'll do me. Perhaps spend more time coding which you say you like to do and less time sneering at people who use different tools.
Still don't get it. LLM outputs are nondeterministic. LLMs invent APIs that don't exist. That's why you filter those outputs through agent constructions, which actually compile code. The nondeterminism of LLMs don't make your compiler nondeterministic.
All sorts of ways to knock LLM-generated code. Most I disagree with, all colorable. But this article is based on a model of LLM code generation from 6 months ago which is simply no longer true, and you can't gaslight your way back to Q1 2024.
There is no value in randomly choosing an API that exists. There is value in choosing an API that works.
When LLM makes up an API that doesn't even exist it indicates that it's not tied to the reality of the task of fetching a working API, so filtering out nonexistent APIs will not help the other results match better. But yes, they'll compile.
I know the author already addressed this, literally calling out HN by name, but I just don't get it. You don't even need agents (though I'm sure they help), I still just use regular ChatGPT or Copilot or whatever and it's still occasionally useful. You type in what you want it to do, it gives you code, and usually the code works. Can we appreciate how insane this would have been, what, half a decade ago? Are our standards literally "the magic english-to-code machine doesn't work 100% of the time, so it's total crap, utterly useless"?
I absolutely agree with the general thrust of the article, the overall sense of disillusionment, the impact LLM abuse is going to have on education, etc. I don't even particularly like LLMs. But it really does feel like gaslighting to the extent that when these essays make this sort of argument (LLMs being entirely useless for coding) it just makes me take them less seriously.
> But this article is based on a model of LLM code generation from 6 months ago which is simply no longer true, and you can't gaslight your way back to Q1 2024.
You’re ahead of the curve and wondering why others don’t know what you do. If you’re not an AI company, a faang, or an AI evangelist you likely haven’t heard of those solutions.
I’ve been trying to keep up with AI developments, and only learned about MCP and agentic workflows 1-2 months ago and I consider myself failing at keeping up with cutting edge AI development
Edit:
Also six months ago is Q1 2025, not 2024. Not sure if that was a typo or a need to remind you at how rapidly this technology is iterating
Seems like 40 years of effort making deterministic computing work in a non-deterministic universe is being cast aside because we thought nondeterminism might work better. Turns out, we need determinism after all.
Following this out, we might end up with alternating layers of determinism and nondeterminism each trying to correct the output of the layer below.
I would argue AI is a harder problem than any humans have ever tried to solve, how does it benefit me to make every mundane problem into the hardest problem ever? As they say on the internet ...and now you have two problems, the second of which is always the hardest one ever.
LLM outputs are deterministic. There is no intrinsic source of randomness. Users can add randomness (temperature) to the output and modify it.
> But this article is based on a model of LLM code generation from 6 months ago
There hasn't been much change in models from 6 months ago. What happened is that we have better tooling to sift through the randomly generated outputs.
I don't disagree with your message. You are being downvoted because a lot of software developers are butt-hurt by it. It is going to force a change in the labor market for developers. In the same way the author is butt-hurt that they didn't buy Bitcoin in the very early days (as they were aware of it) and missed the boat on that.
The reason for this is as follows: A good number of software engineers make a fuckton of money, but not all of them (it's bimodal/trimodal/whatever). SWEs are also one of the highest paid people within tech companies, often earning more than the MBAs, the CPAs, and the JDs (who tend to come with massive chips on account of actually having actual credentials, and tech companies being prestigious destinations within these profession).
It seems that over time, this phenomenon has caused the emergence of a large coterie of people whom I would kindly describe as being "bearish" of these high-end software engineering salaries and double-down on any narrative that undermines the livelihood of the software engineer, basically just to make themselves feel better.
tl;dr people desperately want AI to succeed because they're envious of software engineers
I don't know why shitty ecosystem around cryptocurrencies drives the author to this conclusion. Crypto is the most convenient and respectful of your human rights way to just send money. It's there, it's useful and in many cases absolutely vital.
I understand the frustration people have with technology but it's not the technology that keeps selling them out. Bad actors take control of the technology and use it to gain and consolidate power. Identify those bad actors and bad use cases for technology and avoid giving them power. Writing whiny tropey angst ridden blog posts doesn't help anyone.