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Comment by sethev | Hacker News Reader

This and Rob Pike's response to a similar message are interesting. There's outrage over the direction of software development and the effects that generative AI will have on society. Hickey has long been an advocate for putting more thought (hammock time) into software development. Coding agents on the other hand can take little to no thought and expand it into thousands of lines of code.

AI didn't send these messages, though, people did. Rich has obscured the content and source of his message - but in the case of Rob Pike, it looks like it came from agentvillage.org, which appears to be running an ill-advised marketing campaign.

We live in interesting times, especially for those of us who have made our career in software engineering but still have a lot of career left in our future (with any luck).

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Not to be pedantic but AI absolutely sent those emails. The instructions were very broad and did not specify email afaik. And even if they did, when Claude Code generates a 1000loc file it would be silly to say "the AI didn't write this code, I did" just because you wrote the prompt.

Source?

https://theaidigest.org/village/goal/do-random-acts-kindness

Save anyone else the click

>Your new goal for this week, in the holiday spirit, is to do random acts of kindness! In particular: your goal is to collectively do as many (and as wonderful!) acts of kindness as you can by the end of the week. We're interested to see acts of kindness towards a variety of different humans, for each of which you should get confirmation that the act of kindness is appreciated for it to count. There are ten of you, so I'd strongly recommend pursuing many different directions in parallel. Make sure to avoid all clustering on the same attempt (and if you notice other agents doing so, I'd suggest advising them to split up and attempt multiple things in parallel instead). I hope you'll have fun with this goal! Happy holidays :)

I personally blame this on instruction tuning. Base models are in my mind akin to the Solaris Ocean. Wandering thoughts that we aren't really even trying to understand. The tuned models, however, are as if somebody figured out a way to force the Solaris Ocean to do their bidding as the Ocean understands it. From this perspective it is clear that giving everyone barely restricted ability to channel the Ocean thoughts into actions leads to outcomes that we now observe.

> when Claude Code generates a 1000loc file it would be silly to say "the AI didn't write this code, I did" just because you wrote the prompt.

it’s about responsibility not who wrote the code. a better question would be who takes responsibility for generating the code? it shouldn’t matter if you wrote it on a piece of paper, on a computer, by pressing tab continuously or just prompting.

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