I don't understand this thinking as a computer programmer. My whole life has been about getting a computer to do work so humans don't have to anymore. Every single piece of software written is supposed to take away work from someone.
Do you feel this way about every automation you create? I do know some old school sys admins who felt this way about a lot of infrastructure automation advancements, and didn't like that we were creating scripts and systems to do the work that used to be done by hand. My team created an automated patching system at a job that would automatically run patching across our 30,000 servers, taking systems in and out of production autonomously, allowing the entire process to be hands free. We used to have a team whose full time job was running that process manually. Did we take their jobs by automating it?
Sure, in a sense. But there was other work that needed to be done, and now they could do it.
The whole reason I like programming and computers and technology is precisely because it does things for us so we don't have to do it. My utopia is robots doing all the hard work so humans can do whatever we want. AI is bringing us one step closer to that, and I would rather focus on trying to figure out how we can make sure the whole world can benefit from robots taking our jobs (and not just the rich owners), rather than focus on trying to make sure we leave enough work for humans to stay busy doing shit they don't actually want to do.
The problem is that people are holding AI wrong. They're using AI as the engine of their solution without realising the true solution:
Use AI to create the engine. After that running the engine itself costs as much as keeping the computer running it online. No API costs for 3rd party LLM providers needed.
Because we've been automating large parts of our former jobs for decades. Otherwise we'd all be trying to build things in the least efficient way possible to maximize how long the job takes, which IMO isn't a great idea.
Humans have been minimizing how much work is needed to get a certain level of output for as long as we can track. It's civilization. Should we go back to farming by hand with hoes, to maximize labor used? Go back to streetlights that are individually lit? The society that falls behind on automation becomes poorer, and eventually just dies, as even the people born there tend to choose to leave to higher productivity places. It happened to eastern europe, it happens to the Amish. To any poor society which gets emigration. Doing more with less has always been exciting.
Because usually the people who lose their jobs are people who do not adapt to the market.
Right now it's not clear in which direction everything is involving and that's why people experiment with handing all their data to random agents, figuring out how to store and access context, re-use prompts and other attempts to harness this tech. Most of these will maybe be useless in a year as they might be deeply integrated into the next wave of models but staying on top of the development has always been part of the fun of working in this field.
People are building bots to do the most legible thing possible which is feature in X amount of time. But it doesn't matter if the bottleneck is human thinking time required to output quality code rather than X amount of code written.
I am so much faster with the bots. If you're not faster with the bots then either you write very very little code, or you're doing it very wrong. Tactically they outsmart me 10-100x if you account for the write speed. Even if you just consider the knowledge of languages, libraries, patterns they clearly outperform me. Strategically I do not trust them at all, poor things suck at it, mainly because they always try to take the shortest possible path to the current destination.
And if you think that your personal protest against the automation will in any way affect the direction in which the industry goes then you're delusional. You would have to start something like a political party and collect way more people.
Wake me up when LLMs help me write better code and let me understand the codebase, and not before. Not faster, not more productive, but a more comprehensible codebase that I can reason in my own head.
Otherwise, if they write so much better code, than it's pointless to have a human in the loop.
You will develop quite a lot of illnesses sleeping for this long, but your choice I suppose. Who knows, maybe it happens as soon as next year. I would strongly suggest living a life, any life really, instead of waiting like that.
It's likely the people that were not good developers that suddenly got accelerated "to the top" that seem the most for it. All of the good devs I know have been a bit more cautious on the uptake.
I think it's more subtle than that. There are a lot of measures of what a 'good developer' is, and one of them is 'shipping things'. AI is specifically accelerating that part of the industry - it's much easier to ship code faster now. If you're in a domain that doesn't need quality (easy horizontal scaling, bugs rarely have a critical impact, customers are relatively loyal) then AI is proving that shipping features is more important than code quality.
If you're in a part of the software industry that needs well-optimized and bug-free code then it's less useful. The problem for devs is that those parts of the industry are much smaller.
Funny, I know quite a few extremely talented programmers who cautiously approached the topic, and found that, with proper use, they've found LLMs to be extremely useful. Just a matter of understanding where the boundaries are, and using them responsibly. It's not a magic genie, it augments their existing skill.
Survival instincts. If everyone and everything around you (your job included) is shouting "use AI" it's difficult to take any stand or introduce caution. I think it's less about being excited, more about hoping to not miss the wave and get "left behind."
I think both groups (pro vs anti) will be a bit surprised when the long-term data shows productivity gains were modest on average and producing quality software still needs care/human attention, even with the support of advanced, frontier models. Same job as before, now we just have a power drill instead of a screwdriver. Some people build houses that stand for hundreds of years, others less so.
We've been automating stuff for 60 years, and it only leads to more automation.
At the end of the day, the more automation, the more people you need making sure things work.
There's always going to be a minimal bottleneck for how much an engineer can oversee if they need to do zero implementation.
We're not as far from that point as people think.
Most languages most things are developed in are 10x more expensive than languages of yore.
Rust has a bad reputation for being hard, but it is actually quite expressive.
Less than 50% of what engineers do is code.
IBM was famous, in the early 2000s, for the average dev writing one line of code per day on average.
We're just going to move to a world where the average dev spends <10% of their time coding, but there's likely to be x times more work, so it mostly evens out.
Let’s not pretend that it’s some massive percentage of normal investors that get any say in this.
OK, pension fund, investors, black rock, Vanguard, city group, all of Wall Street want to see the number go up right?
And what’s the easy way to make the number go up? Run as lean as possible even if it means supply chain fragility, over optimize, under deliver because who cares, sacrifice the long-term.
We really shouldn't be creating and allowing a society where the rich can get rich off of destroying the quality of life for everyone else. Smells like guaranteed eventual revolution to me.
Also, don't these people understand that they are destroying everything they was good. Like, surely they understand through all the corporate speak and distended responsibilities that they are directly making everyone's lives worse, for profit. If they do it to toys, to electronics, to websites, apps, then they do it to housing, to Healthcare, to education, to food, to survival itself. These people are literally, intentionally ruining as many people's lives as much as possible in the most effective way they can other than walking down the street shooting random people. Likely, the distributed and multiplied increments of shittifying add up to much more than killing some people, and yet we let them get away with it.
Is there any kind of legal framework that can take into account quality of life? I assume it would be pretty distopian in other ways. But when the "market" exists only to consolidate power into rich peoples hands so they can steal more and more and more from people who aren't rich, isn't that at least a crime of the soul?
Last question. If every hedgefund, private equity group was dissolved overnight, and prevented from ever being recreated. The owners forced to find a way to survive that didn't destroy others hard work, what would we lose? I'm sure they provide some kind of actual service for literally anyone other than making rich people richer right? But what? What is it that these financial frameworks actually do that helps anyone?
Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!
Les aristocrates à la lanterne.
Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!
Les aristocrates on les pendra.
Si on n’les pend pas
On les rompra.
Si on n’les rompt pas
On les brûlera.
They do it because, In the words of Gordon Gecko, they can.
To them, theres a never ending line of hungry vultures right behind them, and if they do not do it, someone will take their place and do it and profit from it. So naturally they MUST do it, because it will inevitably be done also.
> What is it that these financial frameworks actually do that helps anyone?
They are supposed to clean out inefficiencies in economies. They theoretically expose weakness and exploit it, so it can be rebuilt stronger.
Its hard to argue against the premise - In a true capitalistic system. The problem is, the good old USA is a crony capitalistic system, and the politicians are for sale. When private equity can simply erode your business structure with policy, and then buy you out. It is not real capitalism.
At the end of the day, capitalism is the best system we have. The problem is the corruption of man, until we patch that bug, its going to keep causing these exploitable buffer overflows. Unfortunately, the code is in our limbic system, which is really old legacy code
I recently had to gift someone some books, so I decided to try B&N online shipping since Amazon sometimes damages books. I ordered 3 books: all 3 came loose in a big box, all 3 were damaged: they looked like used books, unacceptable as a gift. I returned them, they didn't have ship-to-store option (which was what Gemini was telling me to push for), and they sent me new ones: all 3 arrived damaged, again. It turns out, B&N is worse than Amazon: 100% book damage rate on 6 books, worse customer support, worse return policy, worse everything. Enshitification 100%.
I have found basically no way to buy books online where they don't arrive damaged at this point. I've gone through multiple return/rebuy cycles with Amazon trying to get an undamaged copy and have just given up. I don't know if it's my local distribution center, but it's something like 90% damaged on arrival at this point.
Amazon has had massive quality reduction over the years in their service, but this one and the poor-quality knock-off books are the ones that bother me most.
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