sjajshha

Even funnier is ghuntley going around giving talks, posting on x etc saying “if you don’t learn this stuff you’re gonna be left behind”. I think this was around when he made the first Ralph blog post?

Which of course couldn’t be true. Any “prompt skill” is going to be commodified. Thats the entire premise AI companies are trying to sell.

I found John Glubb’s analysis of the problem much better than the author’s: https://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf

Much more impressive he wrote this 50 years ago, but he might as well have been alive today. History certainly rhymes.

My (former) coworker who’s heavy into this stuff produced a lot of unmaintainable slop on his way out while singing agents praises to hire-ups. He also felt he was getting a lot of value and had no issues.

> People are happy to buy buggy products.

Western society falls apart when we compromise on quality. This kind of behavior is much more common in 3rd world countries. One of the key differentiators in western society is how much we value trust, and “doing the bare minimum to get it done” is low trust.

There’s more to it than that ofc, but blaming “the people” is wrong and will never fix things. Blame the people in power, the people making things, etc. The consumers don’t stand a chance.

> Customer service (chat, phone)

Only because companies have been cutting costs for decades here. This is not a good argument for AI.

> writing software

If you mean typing characters quickly, yes. Otherwise, there’s still a lot of employed devs, with many AI companies hiring.

> writing docs about software

The most useful docs are there because they contain info you cannot determine from the code. AI is not able to do this.

> computer graphics (animation, images)

If you are producing slop, yes.

> driving cars

True, but only because of its improved physical awareness. ie it’s a mechanical gain (better eyes, ears, etc) not an intellectual one (interpreting that information). Self driving cars aren’t LLMs and not really applicable here. Entirely different field.

> AI is only going to become more ubiquitous, there's 0% chance it 'fails' and we return to 2020

Absolutely true. But not for the reasons you think.

Eh, code review has _always_ been the bottleneck (both for the author and any other reviewers). Pulling the agent slot machine for anything remotely challenging is just inflicting pain for no reason on yourself - if quality matters. If not, let it rip.

Otherwise, you’re gonna have to read every line (including those not in the diff) anyways. Typing it out - or getting the AI to do it at a speed you can comprehend - isn’t a meaningful slowdown at all.