jaredcwhite

So don't take it to its extreme. Just put the effort in to make good choices up to the point it's more personally disruptive than you can handle.

Person A: I try to avoid eating beef regularly, cattle farms are so environmentally unfriendly. Person B: Taken to its extreme, we should eliminate all cattle. Say goodbye to the hamburger!!!

Um, it's possible to walk and chew gum at the same time.

The degree of after-the-fact ad hoc justifications for using these tools makes my brain hurt. "I'm in meetings all day anyway" …wtf?! So yay for the machines taking over our skillsets and hard-earned craft so we can attend more meetings*? Sure sounds like a hellscape to me!

* How 'bout I deploy my "digital twin" to attend the meetings for me. That'll show 'em!

Why is a code editor negging me?

"Even if you're skeptical [of genAI], these tools are quickly becoming part of how software gets built."

Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

I am thankful Zed added this feature and most of the post seems reasonable, but it's still the height of weird that they feel compelled to say this—obviously it's not how software gets built by the people who are avoiding these tools intentionally and for good reason!

I agree with the overall point you're making in this comment…except that I don't think this is what "correct" means in the way that both I and the other person who replied thought you meant.

We took you to mean correct as in, given the right inputs, you get the expected outputs. And in that case, our objections do apply. In addition, if correct does mean overall fit-to-purpose the way you are suggesting here, then by gosh my points stands and no code generated by AI is correct! (Because of a variety of factors outside of simply "does the output of this code indicate that it seems to be working")

The ability to work without having to engage with a gaslighting unskilled unethical genAI tool is quickly approaching the territory of human rights. Soon, we will need to engage in human rights campaigns where we demand the Right to GenAI-Free Work. In fact, that day is already upon us.

I feel like we're back in the Windows 98 era. Does nobody remember the days of your local file browser being a web browser? And running native executables in HTML (ActiveX)?? Virtually every PC was getting a virus just plugging into the internet, it was bonkers. Thankfully that plus the DoJ trust busting got Microsoft to back out of all those security nightmares.

And here we are all over again. (double facepalm) I wouldn't touch MCP with a 100-foot pole.

Why does it matter where the paint came from if it looks pretty?

Why does it matter where the legal claims came from if a judge accepts them?

Why does it matter where the sound waves came from if it sounds catchy?

Why does it matter?

Why does anything matter?

Sorry, I normally love debating epistemology but not here on Hacker News. :)

And you sound very ableist. Why should we expect people who may have a cognitive disability of some kind to cloak that with technology, rather than us giving them the grace to communicate how they like on their terms?

Doesn't matter today? What are you even talking about? It completely matters if the code you write is yours. The only people saying otherwise have fallen prey to the cult of slop.

If it took you no time to write it, I'll spend no time reading it.

The holier than thou people are the ones who are telling us genAI is inevitable, it's here to stay, we should use it as a matter of rote, we'll be left out if we don't, it's going to change everything, blah blah blah. These are articles of faith, and I'm sorry but I'm not a believer in the religion of AI.

Increasingly it's become clear to me that the "hallucinating" chatbots are now causing humans themselves to hallucinate, believing that they are extracting something of real value and real productivity gains from these tools when in the vast majority of cases, it's actually the opposite. We're in fact losing value and the productivity gains are a mirage.

I used to roll my eyes when people would joke "the Internet was a mistake". Now I'm not so sure…

Sorry, we will reach the heat death of the universe before I alter a single line of code simply because some LLM somewhere extruded incorrect synthetic text. That is so bonkers, I feel offended I even need to point out how bonkers it is.

The center cannot hold.

We will see either one of two things:

(a) a massive market crash which nearly destroys the software industry and for a time wreaks havoc on the global economy, or (b) a soft crash due to external smoothing effects because never underestimate the power of fake billionaire money; along with a severe bifurcation of tech markets where simultaneously we see slop dominate poor quality mainstream products and then the higher-end luxury products either minimize or outright remove all mention of AI because it's become such a low-brow, tainted brand.

(On that last note, we already have evidence that consumers see that something is now "AI-powered" or whatever and they like it LESS. It will eventually become the kiss of death.)

We keep complaining because Big Tech keeps shoving this unmitigated garbage down our collective throats.

When the boot is on the neck, you don't stop complaining until it has been removed. It's as simple as that.

> plaintext secrets in their env files which are leaked via AI assistants

So…we're not just talking about secrets then. Any text in any file could be leaked. The solution isn't simply moving secrets out of env files, the solution is, um,

*not leaking the contents of local files*

My god. Have we forgotten all semblance of how security & privacy in computing should work?

Completely absurd and ridiculous "analysis" with no basis in factual reality.

Consumers are actually down on AI now. There's increasing negative sentiment whenever a company advertises it now has "AI" in its products. They are trusted less, not more, and viewed with suspicion.

Apple is actually better positioned the more it relegates genAI to smaller local models which are good for a much more tightly-constrained number of key tasks for which LLMs aren't too horrifying.

GenAI tech demos: wildly impressive.

Using them productively & ethically and without getting sucked into a modern-day religious cult: virtually impossible.

Yes, I suppose humanity can pat itself on the back that it has managed to invent something which seems so whiz-bang cool and also is so utterly, utterly ghastly…all at the same time.

> amplify our output to produce at exponential speeds

I think I blacked out when my brain tried to process this phrase.

Nothing personal, but I automatically discount all claims like this (something something require extraordinary evidence and all that…).

Perhaps that's why I as a software developer am fully genAI-skeptic…I've always considered myself a multidisciplinary artist and the skill I have in writing code is simply one of the many possible avenues I use to express myself. (Alas, it's the one which produces the most income by far, but that's another conversation!)

Are you real?

Are you a human?

Is that real text you typed out?

Does anything you're saying have any meaning?

----

That is essentially what you are asking for. Every single online interaction immediately viewed as entirely suspect, with people having to go out of their way to prove they are…people.

Well perhaps you're right that this is where online culture is headed, but we don't have to like it. I hate it. I hate it so bad.

Right there with you, my friend.

"force multiplication"

This is a buzzword, this isn't a thing. Just like the 10x developer was never a thing.

Already seeing disasters, and the pace of awfulness is accelerating. Not sure what it is we're still waiting for at this point!

MCP is not an open standard.

People routinely mistake "protocol specification uploaded to GitHub, PRs welcome" as open standards. They are not. Calling them "open protocols" because they are open source, not open standards (no standards body was involved in the making of this protocol!) is essentially a form of openwashing.

This has been happening way too frequently lately (see also: ATProto), and it really needs to be called out.

This is exactly what I've been saying: it's not that LLMs sometimes "hallucinate" and thus provide wrong answers, it's that they never even provide right answers at all. We as humans ascribe "rightness" to the synthetic text extruded by these algorithms after the fact as we evaluate what it means. The synthetic text extruder doesn't "care" one way or another.

I think the Before picture looked better, and I'm a man.

What an utterly silly and pointless article. I wish I could get my five minutes back.

It's truly frustrating to hear such use of anthropomorphizing terminology.

AI models do not lie, nor do they tell the truth. They synthesize character or pixel data according to complex algorithms and datasets running on silicon hardware. It's up to us humans to use our decidedly non-computer minds to interpret that output data as something which means either truth or falsehood (which itself is a whole separate debate over how we can know what is true, etc.).

> including a link to the office's well-hidden official calculator

So…all you needed was a decent search engine, which in the past would have been Google before it was completely enshittified.

AI has become a negative brand for a fast-growing cohort. When you advertise something as having AI or adding AI, people are turned off rather than excited. And even if they feel neutral about it, they'll certainly opt to spend less money on the non-AI version if they can.

It's simply another sign that we're at the tail-end of a massive bubble that's about to burst spectacularly.

"but most work tasks I'm given are fairly boring"

Part of the joy of craft is the actual process of building a thing, even if the thing you're build is itself "boring". One of my clients right now is a React/Next.js app, which in terms of architecture I find deeply problematic (I tend to advocate vanilla JS, web components, close-to-browser-metal approaches, etc.)—but I still find ways to enjoy the work I do and furthermore I'm proud of the work that I do. I find it anathema that I'd offload any of that craft to a synthetic code text extruder.