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lovelearning

> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.

I must say I find this idea, and this wording, elitist in a negative way.

I don't see any fundamental problem with democratization of abilities and removal of gatekeeping.

Chances are, you were able to accumulate your expert knowledge only because:

- book writing and authorship was democratized away from the church and academia

- web content publication and production were democratized away from academia and corporations

- OSes/software/software libraries were all democratized away from corporations through open-source projects

- computer hardware was democratized away from corporations and universities

Each of the above must have cost some gatekeepers some revenue and opportunities. You were not really an idiot just because you benefited from any of them. Analogously, when someone else benefits at some cost to you, that doesn't make them an idiot either.

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This is technically true in a lot of ways, but also intellectual and not identifying with what the comment was expressing. It's legitimately very frustrating to have something you enjoy democratized and feel like things are changing.

It would be like if you put in all this time to get fit and skilled on mountain bikes and there was a whole community of people, quiet nature, yada yada, and then suddenly they just changed the rules and anyone with a dirt bike could go on the same trails.

It's double damage for anyone who isn't close to retirement and built their career and invested time (i.e. opportunity cost) into something that might become a lot less valuable and then they are fearful for future economic issues.

I enjoy using LLMs and have stopped writing code, but I also don't pretend that change isn't painful.

The change is indeed painful to many of us, including me. I, too, am a software engineer. LLMs and vibe coding create some insecurity in my mind as well.

However, our personal emotions need not turn into disparaging others' use of the same skills for their satisfaction / welfare / security.

Additionally, our personal emotions need not color the objective analysis of a social phenomenon.

Those two principles are the rationales behind my reply.

I appreciate that rationale, I also see the importance of those two principles and I think there's a lot of value there.

I suppose I see "any idiot" as a more general phrase, like "idiot proof", not directly meaning that anyone who uses a LLM is an idiot. However I can also see how it would be seen as disparaging.

Also, while there's a lot of examples of people entrenching into a certain behavior or status and causing problems, I also think society is a bit harsh on people who struggle with change. For people who are less predisposed to be ok with change feels like a lot of the time the response is "just deal with it and don't be selfish, this new XYZ is better for society overall".

Society is pretty much made up of personal emotions on some level. I don't think we should go around attacking people, but very few things can be considered truly objective in the world of societal analysis.

> I don't see any fundamental problem with democratization of abilities and removal of gatekeeping.

This parroted argument is getting really tired. It signals either astroturfing or someone who just accepts what they are sold without thinking.

LLMs aren’t “democratising” anything. There’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the deal.

You know what’s truly “democratic” and without “gatekeeping”? Exactly what we had before, an internet run by collaboration filled with free resources for anyone keen enough to learn.

Dismissing someone with a different opinion as astroturfing is not productive.

There are loads of high performance open source LLMs on the market that compete with the big 3. I have not seen this level of community engagement and collaboration since the open-source boom 20 years ago.

If I believed it was a different opinion I wouldn’t even have written the first paragraph, or maybe the whole reply.

The issue arises from it not being that person’s opinion but a talking point. People didn’t all individually arrive at this “democratisation” argument by themselves, they were sold what to say by the big players with vested interest in succeeding.

I’m very much for discussing thoughts one has come up with themselves, especially if they disagree with mine. But what is not productive is arguing with a proxy.

> I have not seen this level of community engagement and collaboration

Nor this level of spam and bad submissions.

> It signals either astroturfing or someone who just accepts what they are sold without thinking.

> Nor this level of spam and bad submissions.

Your comments seem pretty aggressive for what you’re replying to. Maybe take a beat to assess your biases? I thought the main comment was pretty fair and sensible, yet somehow you landed on calling them a spammer/bad submitter/astroturfer/non-thinker. Maybe they are? I could be wrong, but that's quite a strong reaction for what they asserted at face value. Not really trying to police anything here, I just thought the initial comment had merit and this devolved quite quickly.

You misunderstood. Spamming and bad submissions has nothing to do with the original comment.

You're overthinking it.

Programming is a tricky skill and takes a long time to get good at. Lots of people aren't good at it. AI helps them program anyway, and allows them to sometimes produce useful programs. That's it.

It's not a talking point. It's just the reality of what the technology enables, and it's a simple enough observation that millions of people can independently arrive at that conclusion, and some of them might even refer to it as "democratization".

> Programming is a tricky skill and takes a long time to get good at. Lots of people aren't good at it.

This is a good thing. It's a filter for the careless, lazy, and incompetent. LLMs are to programming what a microwave is to food. I'm not a chef because I can nuke a hot pocket. "Vibe coders" (not AI-assisted coding) are the programming equivalent of the people on Kitchen Nightmares. Go figure, it's a community rife with narcissism, too.

It is a fair note when there are a lot of people with a monetary incentive to hype up a certain piece of technology. And as gp correctly points out: "democratizing" is most commonly used in a very hostile and underhanded manner.

It is what we are talking about, hence not "counterproductive".

> LLMs aren’t “democratising” anything.

They absolutely are. Anytime new knowledge or skills become widely available to everyone, that's a term used for it.

> There’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the deal.

None of that has anything to do with anything. There's competition between companies to keep prices low and accessibility high.

I think you are simply misunderstanding the word "democratic". It isn't just political. From MW:

> 3 : relating, appealing, or available to the broad masses of the people : designed for or liked by most people

Here, it's specifically about making things available to the broad masses of the people that wasn't before.

This isn't a matter of opinion. It's just the meaning of the word.

Those things were already available. That’s the point. What do you think LLMs are trained on?

Huh?

There was no tool that could easily whip up a 300 line script to do something for me when I didn't know how to code, and do it in just seconds.

The topic here is the democratization of a whole set of new abilities. Not just knowledge.

>when I didn't know how to code

....so your only option was to just learn? learn from the freely & vastly available resources? Oh the horrifying tragedy. How elitist. How gatekeeping. To think you had to put in effort.

LLMs have a lot of good and bad, but saying they "democratised" anything is plain bullshit.

> To think you had to put in effort.

But that's the whole point...

When things that previously took hundreds of hours of effort to learn now become available with just a few minutes, they become available to all -- even those without all that extra time, which is most people who have a lot of other competing priorities in their lives.

That's democratization.

I don't understand why you're trying to argue against that. It's a dictionary definition. It's just a meaning of the word.

Whatever you seem to be upset about is something else, I don't know what.

....are you being dense on purpose? Just because something takes time and effort to learn doesn't mean it was monopolised and undemocratised lol. It's the natural course of things, and I cannot believe I have to explain that to you.

The knowledge was freely available for the past few decades, way before LLMs - ergo democratised. The skill was freely available to learn - ergo democratised.

By your logic,

- cooking is a skill that is not democratised (despite the fact that you can do it everyday).

- A person who doesn't take time to learn cooking from cookbooks or youtube tutorials is somehow "lacking access" and in an undemocratic position

- An experienced chef is monopolising his mastery of cooking skills bc they dedicated time to learning them

- a robot that manufactures food is "democratising cooking skills"

See how silly that sounds?

Not to mention, using an AI to do a job is NOT equivalent to learning the skills of the job. Me having a printer doesn't mean "painting skills were democratised".

> here’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the deal.

That would not happen, simply because those companies' interest will never be aligned entirely. There are at least three SOA models at the moment plus many open weight models. Anthropic vs. Pentagon is exactly what would play out.

And what is a precedence? Don't say Google, because search is well and alive.

> You know what’s truly “democratic” and without “gatekeeping”? Exactly what we had before, an internet run by collaboration filled with free resources for anyone keen enough to learn.

We have way more free resources at the moment. Name anything you'd like to learn, someone will be able to point you to a relevant resource. There are also better ways of surfacing that resource.

> This parroted argument

Most of arguments here on HN have been discussed ad nauseam, for or against AI. It's only parroted (or biased) if it's against your own beliefs.

I agree completely, the "democratizing programming" is being overplayed by AI vendors like they are doing community service, and HN commenters use it like a trump card in an argument.

Everyone already had the option to write any code, fork any open source project, publish any of their code, run any of their code but suddenly AI appears and THAT is what makes it democratic? What was undemocratic about it? Is this democracy where idiots are running ai agents that publish smear campaigns, or harass maintainers for not accepting their slop is the democratic future you wish for?

How many (job) positions do you see today that want a backend developer? Frontend developer? Not much because now everyone is expected to be at least full stack, if not also devops as well. The exact same thing is playing out right now with AI, people are expected to produce 5x the amount of code before, if you don't, someone else will take your job that is willing to do it.

Already bloated programs will bloat further, they will require even more resources to run, you will have to pay even more for hardware, they will be slower, less responsive, you will have to pay yet another monthly fee to big tech for their AIs, and people will happily do it and pat themselves that we democratized programming, while running towards the future where nobody will be able to own hardware capable of general computing.

> ...I haven't yet tried the big local ones, because how would that be better? I'm still paying to big tech to run it, just in a different way

Why blame big tech when they're just providing a service at a fair cost (3rd party inference is incredibly cheap)? I'm not sure how that makes sense.

I removed this line because people will get hung up on it and not see the forest from the tree.

LOL. Maybe you are referring to OpenAI and Anthropic? Yes they have codex and opus. But about 1-2 months behind them is Grok, Gemini, and then 2-3 months behind them are all the other models available in cursor, from chinese open source models to composer etc.

How you can possibly use this "big company takes everything away" narrative is ridiculous, when you can probably use models for free that are abour 2 months behind the best models. This is probably the most uncentralised tech boom ever.

(I mean openAI is in such a bad state, I wouldn't be surprised if they lose almost their entire lead and user base within 6-12 months and are basically at the level of small chinese llm developers).

I agree with your general point, but there's an important qualifier:

> when you can probably use models for free that are about 2 months behind the best models.

You can use them for free, but training of near-SOTA foundation models is currently not an open-source process, and it's funded almost exclusively by large and/or wealthy corporations. That's a weak point at the moment from the perspective of openness.

> I don't see any fundamental problem with democratization of abilities and removal of gatekeeping.

It was very democratized before, almost anyone could pick up a book or learn these skills on the internet.

Opportunity was democratized for a very long time, all that was needed was the desire to put in the work.

OP sounds frustrated but at the same time the societal promise that was working for longest time (spend personal time specializing and be rewarded) has been broken so I can understand that frustration..

I'm mad about Ozempic. For years I toiled, eating healthy foods while other people stuffed their faces with pizza and cheese burgers. Everybody had the opportunity to be thin like me, but they didn't take that and earn it like me. So now instead of being happy about their new good fortune and salvaged health, I'm bitter and think society has somehow betrayed me and canceled promises.

/s, obviously I would hope except I've actually seen this sentiment expressed seriously.

I would rather see regulations fixing incentives that create this problem (why does healthy food cost so much more than processed food?) than a bandaid like Ozempic that 2/3 of people can't quit (hello another hidden subscription service) without regaining their weight back.

It's the regulations and subsidies that created the very situation in the first place (in the USA, at least). Twinkies are cheap because we literally pay farmers to grow cheap carbs and sugar. It was design this way, well - lobbied.

I can believe that unfortunately. Good regulation is hard to do without lobbyists getting what they want at the expense of people.

The produce aisle has the cheapest food in the whole store. Inb4 you cite the price of some fancy imported vegetable as your excuse for eating pizza every night.

I can only speak from my own experience but if you want to have a healthy diet (enough protein and calories) where I'm from it costs a lot more than just buying cheap junk food. Well, the proteins cost.

People are obese because they eat at restaurants, eat junk food, and drink sugary or high carb liquids.

They are not obese because they cannot afford the necessary amounts of protein and calories from healthy sources in the grocery store.

You have a point and I agree now that my point on things being expensive was the wrong one. The problem is that junk food is so much easier to get than healthy food.

Healthy food costs time if you want tasty food.

If you train yourself to expect the highs of unhealthy food with excess carbs, sat fats, and salt, which is what restaurants, junk food, and high carb liquids have, then no healthy food is going to be tasty enough.

If you eschew those highs and settle for some sprouted moong bean salad with a little bit of salt/lime/black pepper, or hummus and veggies, or eggs with some smashed avocado on toast, tofu and some broccoli, etc, then it does not cost much time.

There is no baking involved, just cutting, mixing, blending, and maybe soaking. Sautéing or pan frying in a little bit of olive oil or canola oil is also quick.

That's not realistic for most people.

There is a range of food processing going from raw vegetables to hyper-processed fast food.

Most people fall in the middle and expect their food to be boiled, baked, fried, etc. They will most likely not want to eat just salad 24/7.

And once you start boiling/baking/frying, you're adding a lot more processing time just for the food itself, let alone cleaning everything afterwards.

Plus people want varied diets so they need a wide range of different tasting foods, most like 10-20.

Cooking well is really hard and very time consuming (and potentially costly!) to learn.

Healthy living enthusiasts as well as cooking enthusiasts (sometimes the same group, many times different groups) REALLY love to minimize this aspect.

I’m not minimizing anything. I regularly eat the stuff I listed, and it is not more than 1 hour of work per day on average, especially due to leftovers.

>Most people fall in the middle and expect their food to be boiled, baked, fried, etc. They will most likely not want to eat just salad 24/7.

> Plus people want varied diets so they need a wide range of different tasting foods, most like 10-20.

Right, so the problem is people want to eat unhealthy foods. The problem is not lack of money or time.

How can you possibly call boiled and baked food and wanting to eat a varied diet unhealthy?!?

Did you actually read the 2 paragraphs you quoted?

And no lol, I eat very healthy and mainly cook my own vegetarian food, had junk food last time maybe a month ago.

> why does healthy food cost so much more than processed food?

It does not. Legumes, whole grains, vegetables, and yogurt have always been cheaper than processed food.

People prefer eating carbohydrates and saturated fats.

> why does healthy food cost so much more than processed food?

It doesn’t.

> why does healthy food cost so much more than processed food?

It doesn't. Carbs like rice, potatoes, etc. are incredibly cheap. Protein like ground beef and basic cuts of chicken are not expensive. And broccoli, carrots, green peppers, apples -- these are not exactly breaking the bank. Product is seasonal, so you vary what you buy according to what is cheapest this week.

Meanwhile, stuff like breakfast cereal and potato chips and Oreo cookies actually are surprisingly expensive.

> Carbs like rice, potatoes, etc. are incredibly cheap.

Eating too many carbs is not a healthy diet dude

is the result the only thing that matters? or does the journey have its place as well?

is there price to be paid for getting any desired result imaginable without effort on a press of a button?

Yeah, exactly. For the longest time those of us who were self taught and/or started late were looked down upon. Before that, same with corporate vs. open source. This is the same elitist and gatekeeping mentality. If LLM coding tools help people finally get ideas out of their head, then more power to them! If others want to yak shave to and do more serious intellectual type of programming and exploration, more power to them!

It goes past software though. That's just the common ground we share on here. A lifetime ago I was a souhd engineer, and knew how to mic up a rock band. I've since forgotten it all, but I was at a buddies practice space and the opportunity came up to mic their setup. so I dredged up decades old memories, only to take a photo and sent it to ChatGPT, which has read every book on sound engineering and mic placement, every web forum that was open to the public where someone dropped some knowledge out there on the Internet for free. So, damned if it didn't come up with some good suggestions! I wish I could say it only made wrong and stupid suggestions. A lot about mic placement is subjective, but in telling it the kind of sound we were after, it was able to tell us which direction to go to get warmer or harsher.

So it's not just software that's coming to an end, everything else is as well. But; billionaires wives will still need haircuts (women billionaires will also need haircuts), so hairdresser will be the last profession.

I remember the cosmetology department on the other side of the tech school I went to was a common target of mockery on the "tech" tech side. Life as a hairdresser isn't always easy, but it's real skill. And unlike computer touching, requires certification.

People actually value the effort and dedication required to master a craft. Imagine we invent a drug that allows everyone to achieve olympic level athletic performance, would you say that it "democratises" sports? No, that would be ridiculous.

It does technically democratize the exhilarating experiences of that level of performance. Likely also democratizes negative aspects like injuries, extreme dieting, jealousy, neglecting relationships.

That said, if we zoom out and review such paradigm shifts over history, we find that they usually result in some new social contracts and value systems.

Both good expert writers and poor novice writers have been able to publish non-fiction books from a few centuries now. But society still doesn't perceive them as the same at all. A value system is still prevalent and estimated primarily from the writing itself. This is regardless of any other qualifications/disqualifications of authors based on education / experience / nationality / profession etc.

At the individual level too, just because book publishing is easy doesn't mean most people want to spend their time doing that. After some initial excitement, people will go do whatever are their main interests. Some may integrate these democratized skills into their main interests.

In my opinion, this historical pattern will turn out to be true with the superdrug as well as vibe coding.

Some new value will be seen in the swimming or running itself - maybe technique or additional training over and above the drug's benefits.

Some new value will be discovered in the code itself - maybe conceptual clarity, algorithmic novelty, structural cleanliness, readability, succinctness, etc. Those values will become the new foundations for future gatekeeping.

>Some new value will be discovered in the code itself - maybe conceptual clarity, algorithmic novelty, structural cleanliness, readability, succinctness, etc. Those values will become the new foundations for future gatekeeping.

It's a nice idea, but I feel like that's only going to be the case for very small companies or open source projects. Or places that pride themselves on not using AI. Artisan code I call it.

At my company the prevailing thought is that code will only be written by AI in the future. Even if today that's not the case, they feel it's inevitable. I'm skeptical of this given the performance of AI currently. But their main point is, if the code solves the business requirements, passes tests and performs at an adequate level, it's as good as any hand written code. So the value of readable, succinct, novel code is completely lost on them. And I fear this will be the case all over the tech sector.

I'm hopeful for a bit of an anti-AI movement where people do value human created things more than AI created things. I'll never buy AI art, music, TV or film.

The exhilarating experience is a byproduct of the effort it took to obtain. Replace drug with exoskeleton or machine, my point is the same. The way you democratise stuff like this is removing barriers to skill development so that everyone can learn a craft, skill, train their bodies etc.

But I do agree, if everyone can build software then the allure of it along with the value will be lost. Vibe coding is only a superpower as long as you're one of the select few doing it. Although I imagine it will continue to become a niche thing, anyone who thinks everyone and their grandma will be vibing bespoke software is out to lunch.

Personally I think there is a certain je ne sais quoi about creating software that cannot be distilled to some mechanical construct, in the same way it exists for art, music, etc. So beyond assembly line programming, there will always be a human involved in the loop and that will be a differentiating factor.

It would democratize sports, while making sports worthless and unremarkable. It would collapse the market for sports.

> would you say that it "democratises" sports

Given how I've seen a lot of AI "artists" describe themselves and "their" works, yeah, probably a lot of them would.

So you put these all in the same category: gaining knowledge, gaining abilities, and just obtaining things.

I gatekeep my bike, I keep it behind a gate. If you break the gate open and democratize my bike, you're an idiot.

I'm not sure how you're getting that from their post? None of the four things mentioned (book publishing, web publishing, open-source software, computer hardware) involve stealing someone's property, he's saying that the ability to produce those things widened and the cost went down massively, so more people were able to gain access to them. Nobody stole your bike, but the bike patents expired and a bunch of bike factories popped up, so now everyone can get a cheap bike.

I did have misgivings about saying that because I'm from the old "information wants to be free" school. But the subject was idiocy, and the point isn't to say that the bike was stolen, but that the bike-taker didn't do anything clever, or have much of a learning experience.

Maybe it's of value that any idiot can do this, but we're still idiots.

it is more like:

You gatekeep your bike, you keep it behind a gate, you don't let anyone else ride it.

Your neighbor got a nicer bike for Christmas, rode it by your house and now you are sad because you aren't the special kid with the bike any more, you are just regular kid like your neighbor.

No, both bikes are owned by a $trillion corporation who collects a monthly rent.

Jesus that's brutal. Accurate. But I feel attacked ;p

Yeah, if you studied and mastered all of the various disciplines required for fabricating a bicycle, and then fabricated your own by hand and offered to do likewise for others, sometimes in exchange for compensation, sometimes for free (provided others could use the bike), only for some machine that mass produces bikes to (informal) spec that was built by studying all of the designs you used for the bikes you made to suddenly become widely and cheaply available.

Yeah, and that machine that replaces you was built by engineers.

We can dish it out, but we can’t take it.

Using physical analogs for virtual things is not the best choice, for example: Would you give a copy of your bike, or copy of your food to your poor neighbor kid if you could copy it as easily and as cheaply as digital products?

Actually he would be very wise, for he then has a bike and can ride it or sell it for money. You have to learn capitalist thinking to succeed in this economy.

While I can see your point I also think it is not directly relevant to OP. Firstly, I don't think OP meant that people are idiots for using LLM's, it was just a way of saying that skill is no longer required so even idiots can do it whereas it used to be something that required high skill.

As for the comparisons - some are partly comparable to the current situation, but there's some differences as well. Sure books and online content enabled others to join, thereby reducing the "moat" for those who built careers on esoteric knowledge. But it didn't make things _that_ easy - it still required years of invested time to become a good developer. Also, it happened very gradually and while the developer pie was growing, and the range of tech growing, so developers who kept on top of technology (like OP did) could still be valuable. Of course, no one knows fully how it will play out this time around; maybe the pie will get even bigger, maybe there's still room for lots of developers and the only difference is that the tedious work is done. Sure, then it is comparable. But let's be honest, this has a very real chance of being different (humans inventing AI surely is something special!) and could result in skill-sets collapsing in value at record time. And perhaps worse, without opening new doors. Sure, new types of jobs may appear but they may be so different that they are essentially completely different careers. It is not like in the past you just needed to learn a new programming language.

> "removal of gatekeeping"

Gates were put in place for lawyers, doctors, and engineers (real ones, not software "engineers") because the cost of their negligence and malpractice was ruined lives and death. Gatekeeping has value.

Software quality, reliability, and security was already lousy before the advent of LLMs, making it increasingly clear that the gate needed to be kept. Gripes about "gatekeeping" are a dogwhistle for "I would personally benefit from the bar being lowered even further".

The argument for lawyers, doctors and "real" engineers seems like a strawman here.

This discussion is specifically about lowering the barriers of programming and creating using software.

I haven't said anything at all about other professions nor do I think my arguments for democratizing software creation apply to law, medicine, or "real" engineering.

There's also a false equivalence in the software part of your comment. It equates lowering of barriers for recreational/hobby coding with software engineering for serious purposes.

Since you dismiss me as a dogwhistle, I hope my terming your argument as elitist, strawmanish, and full of false equivalences is only seen as fair.

The real litmus test is whether one would allow LLMs to determine a medical procedure without human check. As of 2026, I wouldn’t. In the same sense I prefer to work with engineers with tons of experience rather than fresh graduates using LLMs

Elitism is good. Elitism is just. There is absolutely nothing wrong with elitism.

Skill based one of course.

Democratizing? A handful of companies harvesting data and building products on top of it is democratizing?

Open research papers, that everyone can access is democratizing knowledge. Accessibile worldwide courses, maybe (like open universities).

But LLMs are not quite the sane. This is taking knowledge from everyone and, in the best case, paywalling it.

I agree in spirit that the original comment was classist, but in this context your statements are also out of place, in my opinion.

how is 2-3 centralized providers of this new technology "democratization"?

It's _relatively_ democratic when compared to these counterfactual gatekeeping scenarios:

- What if these centralized providers had restricted their LLMs to a small set of corporations / nations / qualified individuals?

- What if Google that invented the core transformer architecture had kept the research paper to themselves instead of openly publishing it?

- What if the universities / corporations, who had worked on concepts like the attention mechanism so essential for Google's paper, had instead gatekept it to themselves?

- What if the base models, recipes, datasets, and frameworks for training our own LLMs had never been open-sourced and published by Meta/Alibaba/DeepSeek/Mistral/many more?

> - What if Google that invented the core transformer architecture had kept the research paper to themselves instead of openly publishing it?

I'm pretty sure that someone else would have come around the corner with a similar idea some time later, because the fundamentals of these stuff were already discussed decases before "Attention is all you need" paper, the novel thing they did was combining existing knowhow into a new idea and making it public. A couple of ingredients of the base research for this is decades old (interestingly back then some European universities were leading the field)

> I'm pretty sure that someone else would have come around the corner with a similar idea some time later, because the fundamentals of these stuff were already discussed decases before

I am not trying to be dismissive, but this could apply to all research ever

thats true! I meant "not somewhen accidentally in the future" but more of "relative close together on the timeline"

You're right! And cars when they were invented didn't give increased mobility to millions of people, because they came from just a few manufacturers.

Cell phones made communication easier for exactly zero people even though billions have been sold. Why? Because they come from just a few different companies.

Cars are a great analogy because they made mobility significantly worse for people who can’t afford them or refuse to use them for ethical reasons.

Those people are the exception that proves the rule.

I will tell that to the billions of people who are walking and biking around at this very moment. Just give me some time.

I said worse, not impossible. Because of cars, I have to take longer routes and put myself into danger while working.

And cars now have become privacy nightmares, which we are now beholden to

cars, up to relatively recently, have been pure hardware machines that when a consumer buys, they can own. Now that's starting to change. Let's see how "democratized" cars are when the manufacturers can hard-lock "owners" from them.

Similar story to cell phones.

LLMs are in this state right out the gate.

There are lots of open weight models

Coding is one of the least gate kept things in history. Literally the only obstacle is "do I want to put in the time to learn it". All Claude is doing is remixing all the free stuff that was already a google search away.

I suggest trying to find out how the things you're taking for granted - time, literacy, books - remain barriers for many people in many parts of the world.

LOL, you sound like people "democratizing" finance with crypto.

I'm sure that's why they're investing 1 trillion in AI, for the poor illiterates.

Exactly. How ridiculous. The world doesn’t owe ‘principal engineers’ shit. I hate to work with people like this.

—- from a ‘principal engineer’

This is a good response. Progress has always been resisted by incumbents

> elitist in a negative way.

It's funny you say that, because I've seen plenty of the reverse elitism from "AI bros" on HN, saying things like:

> Now that I no longer write code, I can focus on the engineering

> In my experience, it's the mediocre developers that are more attached to the physical act of writing code, instead of focusing on the engineering

As if getting further and further away from the instructions that the CPU or GPU actually execute is more, not less, a form of engineering, instead of something else, maybe respectable in its own way, but still different, like architecture.

It's akin to someone claiming that they're not only still a legitimate novelist for using ChatGPT or a legitimate illustrator for using stable diffusion, but that delegating the actual details of the arrangement of words into sentences or layers and shapes of pigment in an image, actually makes them more of a novelist or artist, than those who don't.

Yes, both are forms of elitism.

Yeah, and one is at least plausibly justifiable (though still potentially unfounded), while the other is absurd on its face.

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