Comment by saulpw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saulpw | Hacker News Reader

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I appreciate what you're trying to do, but for myself, I'm not depressed because my skills are less valuable. I enjoyed the money but it was never about that for me. I'm depressed because I don't like the way this new coding feels in my brain. My focus and attention are my most precious resources and vibe coding just shatters them. I want to be absorbed in a coding flow where I see all the levels of the system and can elegantly bend the system to my will. Instead I'm stuck reviewing someone/something else's code which is always a grind, never a flow. And I can feel something terrible happening in my brain, which at best can be described as demotivation, and at worst just utter disinterest.

It's like if I were a gardener and I enjoyed touching dirt and singing to plants, and you're here on Gardener News extolling the virtues of these newfangled tractors and saying they'll accelerate my impact as a gardener. But they're so loud and unpleasant and frankly grotesque and even if I refrain from using one myself, all my neighbors are using them and are producing all their own vegetables, so they don't even care to trade produce anymore--with me or anyone else. So I look out at my garden with sadness, when it gave me such joy for so many decades, and try to figure out where I should move so I can at least avoid the fumes from all the tractors.

Well said! Reading this I feel reminded of the early protests against industrialization and automation in other fields. Checks all the same boxes - insecurity and fear about the future, alienation towards the new tools, ...

Not saying AI is similar in impact to the loom or something, it just occured to me how close this is to early Luddite texts.

The OG alienator was the Agricultural Revolution, settling and toiling repetitively in predetermined ways, unlike the more adventurous lifestyle from before with all the camping, hunting, gathering, where circumstances brought always novel challenges, you could be a man spearing a deer, instead of just killing some docile domesticated cow. Searching for pheasant eggs and being happy if you found some, instead of going out every morning to the predictable presence of eggs in the chicken coop.

Although, gradually, all over the world people chose that lifestyle rather than take their chances with the seasons and the hunt.

Exactly, and similarly people may adopt AI too, whether they like the aesthetics or not.

Mostly because if you settled down a tilled a field of barley you had a reliable source of beer. Finding beer in the wild was and still is an almost certain failure.

The roots of global civilization are brown and frothy.

So what you're telling me is that I am genetically predisposed to brew and drink beer?

Explains a lot.

Explains it to my satisfaction!

Chose is a little strong. They were forced into it because agricultural societies could field armies orders of magnitude larger than hunter/gatherers.

It's telling that the nobles of agricultural societies generally still hunted, and often reserved that privilege.

Comparing the impact of LLMs on programming to the agricultural revolution is a pretty solid analogy!

This is true, but it started way earlier than AI with software development though. A lot of software developers' job is just being ticket monkies, adding small things or fixing bugs for a huge company that nobody cares about. The alienation is real.

This is, of course, an attribute of capitalism.

Like carpenters, gardeners and farmers, there are very few software developers who truly have the luxury to treat their work as a craft and not a factory output.

Many Luddites were fine with using the new Loom machines. They smashed them because they were precious to the capital holders and in a time when there were no labour laws. The Luddites were protesting child labour, forced labour, and having no social safety net when they were discarded by their employers other than workhouses.

This has been the dream of the capital classes since time immemorial.

And unfortunately (for humanity) this has been the status quo for the whole civilization. Small ruling elite class (you might designate them as masters, lords or employers) with all the wealth, minimal or no "middle class" and lots of poor people (you might designate them as peasants or slaves or workers).

The only exception to this has been the period of time since World War 2 when in most of the "western" countries the middle class demanded and took their share of the wealth. That's the time when modern well-fare states were born, universal health care became a thing, working safety improved, education became accessible. etc.

All these were NOT given by the elite but TAKEN by the working class via social reforms, workers unions and social democracy.

The capital owning class wants to take all these away and they're succeeding.

So yes, in fact the Luddites were not against technology, they were against the unilateral and uneven distribution of wealth produced by the technology.

There was another time of great social upheaval and progress.

It was after the Black Death.

Similar circumstances, if you think about it.

Industrialization actually helped the middle class insofar as you needed "skilled workers" to work the industrial equipment, make decisions, and process. The fact that production had scaled in a world of scarcity meant that your worker had greater leverage. They often knew each other as well, went to the same schools, etc which meant less info asymmetry as to their worth/value. It moves the value to something that takes time, skill and sometimes luck to achieve that being skills and experience. This was hard to replicate (e.g. our school, college, university systems), required significant training and created "pets not cattle" with hard to get skills meaning the new skilled middle class could rise and exercise their new found negotiating power.

Somewhat unprecedented in human history. All because intelligence had scarcity. AI changes that.

AI is the real dream of the capital classes. It makes intelligence cheap potentially undoing the very thing that gave birth to the last century's middle class. In the long term, given current trends, I wouldn't be surprised if these AI technologies revert us back to most of human history -> where the world is very unequal, meritocracy dies and most of us are trying to just exist/survive whilst the capital holders have abundance. It explains the large valuations as well of AI/Tech lately and the weird deals going on; this isn't a game of economics anymore; its an arms race of power in the new world structure. I suspect to these people no amount of money is enough; if you win you win for the next era of humanity.

If you think about it, Luddites were the original victims of capitalist propaganda.

Exactly. Most people who haven’t studied the history think the Luddites smashed the machines because they were against progress and industrialization. Hence the modern interpretation of Luddite meaning, “against technology.”

Many Luddites were shot against the wall or jailed. History often lies because it is written by the winners.

I'd say the fear is justified. The economy should serve the people and the citizens not the other way around. Yet, our economies are increasingly the other way around, people have to fit into to the shape of the economy.

It's not hard to see a future where the workers displaced by AI get pushed to the sidelines and fringes of the society while the capital holders hoard more wealth and get the benefits of the "value" created.

We already have half the population on this planet living in slums without access to economic means and in the "developed" countries larger and larger group of people are barely hanging on either already displaced and unemployed or working jobs below living wages.

Frankly, It'd stupid not to be concerned.

How beautifully put, and I couldn't agree more. I feel exactly the same way.

However, I am still unconvinced that software development will go down this way. But if woking as a software developer will require managing multiple agents at the same time instead of crafting your own code — you can count me out, too.

If it is not about the money, why do you have to use these tools? If you enjoy small farming why concern yourself with mass production, or expensive equipment? Remain in the lane you enjoy?

I enjoy programming and I enjoy being paid for programming. I'm being pressed to use AI for my paid work. And I don't enjoy AI-powered programming.

As of today, I've disabled Copilot. The only autocomplete that I can accept is absolutely mechanical one, not any kind of smart. I want to write the rest of the code myself. I like it.

I was weird in StackOverflow era, because I never blindly applied snippets, like other programmers do. I went over them token by token, reading underlying library sources and docs, always creating my own solution. It made me less productive, but I feel that my code was more robust and maintainable, so it was a good trade-off for me.

May be it'll work out the same way with AI, time will tell.

I think it will; AI is not going away, but once the hype has settled, the first companies have gone bankrupt or acquired, and employers are paying for them, they will become part of someone's daily tools not unlike the existing autocomplete tools.

Fwiw I’m an ai proponent who loves that flow state you are describing. Programming literally was the first time I found it as a youth and I’ve been addicted to it since then.

But it’s such a small part of my professional life. Most of what I do is chores and answering simple questions and planning for small iterations on the original thing or setting up a slightly different variant.

Llm’s have freed me of so much of that! Now I outsource most of that work to the llms and greedily keep the deep flow inducing work for myself.

And I have a new tool to explain to management why we are investing in all the tooling and processes that we know lead to quality, because the llms are catnip for the managerial mind.

As time goes by I tend to agree more and more with your POV.

Very well said. I feel the exact same. :(

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