Why Casey Muratori avoids AI [video] | Hacker News Reader

Why Casey Muratori avoids AI [video]

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7 pointstherepanic3 comments

Would have hoped for better arguments. I got the impression that he is not actually sure why to avoid AI, but welcomes every argument without really having a concept.

This is from my memory of listening to the full interview a few days ago, not just this snippet: I am not sure he is advocating that people should avoid AI, as long as they recognize its limitations and dangers, and he admits it can boost productivity.

His argument is specific to himself only:

"Many programmers come at programming at a much more business oriented perspective. Their goal is to make a specific thing and sell it ... or release it as a piece of free software. And the goal is just to have the software. They don't really care how they got there. So if you're coming at it from that perspective, whether you programmed it line by line, or whether you use AI, doesn't really make a difference.

...

But for me, I just like the act of programming. That's always been kind of why I did it. It's just kind of a happy accident that I lived in an era where I got paid well to do that. But that wasn't why I did it ... It's not an argument about quality. It's not an argument about productivity. It's about a fundamental love of the act of programming."

I am in the same boat as Casey. I like to program more than I like the finished product (and for me, that's just fine, since I don't work for anyone, so I am not screwing up any company's productivity).

I'm part of the old guard too, and I like the process itself, but I also like the result. I just think his arguments why to avoid AI sound like they're taken from an academic brochure, not like fact-based assessment grounded in relevant practical experience. Casey frames the choice as a binary: either you write every instruction yourself, or you lose the craft; he completely misses that there might be a third path where the craft is expressed at a higher level of abstraction. He stated that he likes to write assembler; but he also likes to write in higher-level programming languages; same for me, and I don't see a contradiction or a need for a binary decision. There were indeed arguments in the seventies and eighties that "real programmers don't use high-level programming languages"; at the time there were good reasons for this arguments because optimizing compilers were in their infancy; so it was a fact that true performance depended on human ingenuity. Now we are back at a similar discussion, just on a different level.

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