I've never understood the water argument... yes, it takes a lot of water in the initial setup to fill the water cooling loops, but isn't not constantly burning water, right? it gets cooled off again and goes around the loop
It's about evaporative cooling. Read about how cooling towers work in nuclear and coal plants. The principle is the same for the data centers, but it the wasteheat to get rid of comes from computation.
They obviously shouldn't be doing it like that, but since clean water is cheap and business in absence of reason optimizes for lowest costs that's exactly what they did.
I'm not saying this situation is different from all of the other technological paradigm shifts in history.
But what concerns me is that authors of articles such as this feel no need to differentiate themselves from other anti-technology arguments in history.
Why would they need to differentiate? You're implying those arguments were wrong?
The argument usually isn't "I believe X will not happen," it's usually either "I believe X should not happen" or "I believe we should manage how X happens".
In this context, a "car" is a vehicle with some sort of engine, as opposed to a horse, mule or other animal. Those who rejected cars when they came out would also happily reject buses, cabs and even trains.
"After trying Kagi/Duck Duck Go, I have gone back to Google for search and I freely grant that I find the “AI Overview” to be useful."
I feel compelled to point out that Kagi does offer AI-backed answers if you want it to. Just pose your query with a question mark to trigger the AI response in addition to the usual search results. It is not ever the default or only answer, and I pray Kagi keeps it that way!
I use the AI option more often than I thought I would, usually for things that I don't consider controversial or complicated.
I see a lot of people throw their hands up in the air and say "I have no control over this, might as well go all in on AI".
But we as individual consumers have more power than we think. We don't need to use these AI features and products. We've survived perfectly fine without AI. Made plenty of scientific discoveries and lead enriched lives without it.
The biggest "fuck you" to the pricks who pushed this on us would be if we collectively went "meh".
I understand the appeal of saying fuck you to billionaires and pathological liars CEOs and the annoying usages of AI, but i don't understand the wider "fuck you AI".
AI are here, is it going to demolish and (maybe) reconstruct the world as we know it, trying to avoid it it's just silly. There is no sane world where we can "stop AI", even if every single researcher were to do vanish tomorrow and the hardware and schematics magically gone, it would still only be a stopgap.
This is being against interest in a specific technology. For example I could say "I think yo-yos are stupid". But the yo-yo is here to stay! The world must adapt to the yo-yo or be left behind, because we all think that yo-yos are very important and we use them constantly to do everything instead of using our hands! Or we could not be interested in that, because it's stupid.
I don't like this inevitability framing. It's not true of other actually dangerous things. "There is no sane world where we can stop drugs/nukes/guns/CP, even if every single chemist/physicist/metallurgist/pedo were to vanish tomorrow, it would only be a stopgap [thus we should just let everyone have those things]." Yes, those things will exist in some highly restricted or illegal contexts, but that doesn't mean any of them need to be in the workplace or accessible to every citizen. Usage and access and development could be heavily restricted in just the same way. You don't think AI is dangerous enough for this comparison to be sensible, but I'm not so sure.
Likewise, arguments that other countries will have it therefore we must have it, are specious. Some countries have nukes, we don't let every country have them, we certainly don't let citizens have them; some countries produce CP, we don't let citizens access it; some countries have millions of guns among citizens, we don't let the guns cross the border. All this is to say that it would not be infeasible to broadly ban AI in most contexts. Obviously this won't happen in the current political climate, but it's not a law of the universe that AI pervading daily life is inevitable.
What I would love to see is a side by side comparison of two companies (one using AI, and one without) over an extended period of time.
Id wager that they would fare the same. The time saved on some tasks are outweighed by extra time spent on others. Everyone assumes that just because you can pump out more features, you're more successful.
I'm all ears for a solution. But all I hear is some workers want to bar other workers (H1B, seniority, etc) from working. I hear nothing about organizing.
Class warfare is nice to write about, but there's been 0 credible approaches in the last 2 years proposed. Do you think it will magically appear sometime? Are we generally prepared to stand with our less experienced colleagues? and immigrants?
Why? AI is enriching my life and letting me focus on solving hard problems. I don't believe in the sentience crap and am just using it at face value for what it is, a useful productivity tool. Every software developer's main purpose is to automate and reduce the amount of boring manual labour required. By this logic, should people in the past have "resisted the software development department"?
And then after a few years the moralists have to fight a world-spanning war to keep the pragmatists from completely eliminating people groups they don't like from the planet.
Why are we glossing over the fact that it's all trained on stolen code, stolen art, stolen books? It's unethical to use it, it's unethical to take money for it. It should be either free or killed. I really don't understand why we just collectively accepted that.
IMHO, if they purchased the books etc, it's fair because, for me, it's like a biological neural network (i.e human) reading and watching the contents and memorizing them.
Your heart is in the right place but your conclusion is not.
Because it was trained unethically we have a few moral obligations:
1) USE IT. Do not let only unethical people use a force amplifier on our collective efforts.
2) STOP PUBLISHING HUMAN GENERATED CONTENT. The more original human thought = the more they harvest our thinking.
3) Generate only known things in novel combinations. Do not provide new insights.
I could go on but strategically thinking AI is not going to be stopped in the way you are thinking. So you need to think a bit deeper on methods of optimizing the situation.
I'm an open source dev and I appreciate AI. I'm glad it exists and I have no problem with people being rewarded for their work on AI.
That said, I also think everyone who contributed content online deserves to be rewarded for their contribution, especially since OpenAI (which made the largest contribution) was a non-profit in the beginning. So there should be some kind of tax. Otherwise I agree, it's not ethical. It's not 'fair use' of copyrights.
Listening to developers complain about AI doing things to their life and the world at large when they have spent the past 30 years automating just about everyone else they could out of a job (Since this has been one of the primary uses of software) is ... something else. It sounds like a a a mix of hubris, arrogance, cognitive dissonance, ignorance, etc.
Only when it started to affect their world did any developers start to care, and even then nobody seems to ever stop and say "hey what were we doing the past 30 years, maybe we should think about this", it's instead "hey look at what these other people are doing with AI, someone should think about this".
The difference is that automated tasks are (or should be) deterministic and reproducible, and taking up time devs could be using to do their actual job (writing code, solving technical problems, etc).
And how could we not be? The world is unfathomably big and complex, and each of us wants their own narrative (well that, and to economically support loved ones, etc...)
Yup. If current-gen AIs were capable of writing articles, but not code, then devs wouldn't care at all. None of these articles would exist, and some new variation of "learn to code" would be the snarky reply to nay-sayers.
In fact, we already pretty much have proof of this: devs didn't care when software destroyed the journalism industry twenty years ago. Turns out that people ultimately only care when their only jobs are on the line.
I would care if even these machines could only write articles, and I cared when software destroyed multiple forms of media delivery.
I won't say it was all bad, unequivocally, but it made me sad and I tried to think of solutions.
Turns out, alas, that make people are willing to trade away freedom, independence, privacy, and a functioning culture to save a few bucks and get dopamine hits on demand.
I admittedly flip-flop on this quite a bit. I use LLMs in my work and for a bunch of pet projects I don’t really care much about.
For the pet projects, it’s not really a big deal. I’m the only user, and I as the user don’t care how it works under the hood.
Work is a different story. I have never felt more disconnected from my work than in the last 6-8 months. It takes a huge mental toll to read into our code and figure stuff out, almost like I just got hired and I’m working on new code for the first time. I’m asked to read “specs” written by LLMs that are unintelligible and I find my brain disconnecting immediately. Tickets, also written by LLMs pose the same problem.
I’m asking teammates questions because I want their answer and I’m told to just ask Claude.
None of this feels good, it may be where the industry is heading but as a professional it feels wrong.
What I hate the most is people vomiting AI slop communicating with others. I have teammates who decided that an agent producing a wall of text summarizing changes in a pull request instead of a simple "LGTM" is a good idea. I have teammates who talk using AI almost exclusively (you can see a small tag "Sent using Claude" or "Sent using Cursor" under their messages)
a teammate who exclusively writes slop PRs and copy/paste LLM responses to slack has demonstrated they can be replaced by an LLM integration to slack and github.
If your company cares enough/will allow it, make a written policy that authors are responsible for their code and they must still meet whatever quality bar existed at your company pre-LLMs. It's awkward, but I've seen friends whose companies have started to make it normal to say "I'm not reviewing this, it was clearly written by AI" the same way pre-LLMs you could also say "I'm not reviewing this because it's 5k LoC and needs to be split up into smaller reviews".
Then if people send you slop you can either point them to the guidelines or, if they don't stop, report them for violating workplace rules and make them suffer.
I'm feeling the same, personal projects have never felt better, but work has slowly felt more miserable.
Code reviews come back with a ream of issues that I just want to scream "I don't give a fuck".
Pre-LLM no-one would have cared that if another class was configured differently ( it isn't ) and called the new class in a different way ( it doesn't ), that you'd in some race-condition occasionally leak a resource, but only on shutdown when the program is about to terminate anyway.
That's the kind of issue that claude loves to find and write up in a code review with the exact same verbiage and write up style as if it had just found a naive SQL injection from string concatenation.
Prior to LLMs I doubt anyone would even have spotted the first issue, let alone bothered to write it up.
But instead it's another round of review, another round of trying to decipher the LLM's comments to discover whether it's a meaningful problem or a nothingburger.
when llms write all the code, all we have left are the specs. ive found a lot of success applying software engineering discipline to spec writing, the giving the LLM a few guardrails around implementing the spec.
PRs review more quickly when you have human written spec diffs to orient you and guide (or skip) the code review.
a danger to avoid is writing specs which are basically just really bad code (prose is terrible code). you can work towards patterns to avoid this pitfall.
either way, find the human layer and dont use LLMs there. make all the important decisions in the spec, delegate the other decisions to the LLM.
i believe this is the new craft.
that said, i expect a small but significant exodus from software. a lotta folks came for the "programming" that is now being outsourced. were becoming so tired, just absolutely burning out.
i hope we will eventually realize its time to go, instead of giving up our souls.
A lot of the "none of this feels good" is that the models have been RL'd to produce longer and longer outputs. You don't start with a 1 paragraph explanation, being forced into a back-and-forth with the model so much anymore, unless you explicitly ask. Instead, it'll generate a 10 page report that you sorta-skim and the hooks of your attention skid off, and you prompt something vague like "make it shorter".
I see good ethical reasons to be against AI, but I see no reasons why “resisting” would lead to anything but irrelevance. So I think this is terrible advice
I'm sympathetic to the author's core position. I think LLMs as they're currently deployed are doing net societal harm so far. For example, for every React app whistled up in five hours, there's a high schooler or college student out there sleepwalking through their foundational courses and being set up to catastrophically fail upon trying to enter the job market.
But I think it's important for the quality of public discourse that we forward only the best, strongest arguments for any given position (whether I personally agree with that position or not). A weak argument gives unnecessary purchase to unscrupulous haters who might use that weaker argument as a low-grade "straw man" to dismiss the whole position.
So with that preamble, some constructive criticism (very well-intentioned):
> I am not exaggerating: We need to resist “AI” so that thousands, perhaps millions of people do not die.
On this one you are, in fact, exaggerating (certainly with "millions," likely with "thousands" as well).
The overwhelming majority of people who lose their job for whatever reason (and there are many reasons, not just this one issue) fall back on a support network of their family and friends while they "get back on their feet" by pivoting to another job or form of employment (sometimes branching into entrepreneurship, for example).
The alternative to employment at whatever FAANG or FAANG-adjacent company someone was laid off from is not "death." It is typically "some, sometimes quite significant, discomfort." Granted "AI Layoffs" are starting to ripple out beyond FAANG, but the story is similar in other industries.
If "layoffs kill people" is the moral hill we choose to plant our flag on, then mustn't we also campaign with equal vociferousness against all the other causes of layoffs in general? Since to do otherwise is to sit by while those laid off allegedly die in droves of thousands or perhaps millions?
It also occurs to me that this framing ("AI causes layoffs") also gives incompetent and unaccountable executives a pass by pinning the actual harm done by irresponsible layoffs (which to be clear, is not none!) on "the AI" rather than on the leaders who are in the positions to actually decide what happens in their organizations.
I think the argument is much stronger if we talk about the aggregate cost to humanity being paid in terms of displacement, life disruption, and curtailed opportunity (especially for juniors). We should not make the "toxic escalationism" move of equivocating things we don't like with negligent homicide, even if it makes for a punchy one-liner.
> For example, for every React app whistled up in five hours, there's a high schooler or college student out there sleepwalking through their foundational courses and being set up to catastrophically fail upon trying to enter the job market.
> forward only the best, strongest arguments for any given position... A weak argument gives unnecessary purchase to unscrupulous haters who might use that weaker argument as a low-grade "straw man" to dismiss the whole position.
Excellent point. Thank you for writing such a cogent argument.
It is clear that the rich and powerful are making short-term decisions that are causing widespread and long-term harm. Decisions such as, AI-pilled investors demanding unsustainable productivity from companies, and CEOs in turn forcing employees to use agentic coding and laying the rest off.
Such decision-making is not new, of course, but LLM technology is helping grifters and con artists to turbo-charge it. Founders can raise money using cool demos that achieve the impossible. Investment analysts can back up their AI story with huge paper profits.
The result, as you summarized, is life and career displacement and missed opportunities for young people. It's just too abstract and diffuse of an impact to influence people with, and it also seems to be railing against the holy cow of Capitalism.
"Data centers bad!", or "AI is disrupting humanity and the end is nigh!" are much more punchy slogans.
I'm not sure how valuable this advice is. From what I can see, Jeffries hasn't been involved in actual software development for decades (he is ~87 and has a lot of great accomplishments under his belt, but in the year 2026, 0% of his income relies upon him generating solutions for paying clients in a competitive space, and probably hasn't for a long, long time).
For some reason HN readers love this sort of content, largely by periphery players who mostly think it gives them an angle for clicks. And, I mean, as someone who uses lots of AI to delight clients and stay competitive, you be you. It leaves more for me.
> From what I can see, Jeffries hasn't been involved in actual software development for decades (he is ~87 and has a lot of great accomplishments under his belt, but in the year 2026, 0% of his income relies upon him generating solutions for paying clients in a competitive space, and probably hasn't for a long, long time).
I had to google him to even figure out why he's relevant (his About Me on the linked site is literally "I’m Ron Jeffries, the same old one. This is my new site. It’s where all my new articles will go" very helpful smh.) Xtreme Programming? When was that last relevant, 20 years ago?
we can all debate the finer points but in any case "resist" is exactly the right message.
AI companies are racing to build empires on products built on the whole of human writing, charging rent to access it, then leveraging their scale to improve the model.
the big data era was a gold rush for greed. the AI era is has upgraded to a warp engine for greed.
the harms and manipulation of social media took ages to enter the social discourse, and are just now turning into legal action.
AIs warp-engine speed guarantees greed will fuel warp-engine scale harm before society catches up, and before America's greedy ass politicians are cornered into trying to do something.
resist fucking greed. if you gotta use LLMs, at least don't pay an AI company.
I criticize stuff like this a lot. I criticize the doomer “bomb data centers” rationalist cult even more.
At the same time, maybe I shouldn’t, and I sometimes find all the AI skeptic and even doomer discourse heartening.
We really messed up with the Internet. I’m an Xennial and I had a minor role in it but I was there and it feels like the Internet was “our project.” I was literally born with the PC, discovered BBSes as a tween and the pre web Internet as a teen.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the net is bad. I think it’s more positive than not (still). But my god the addiction and disinformation and brain rot and propaganda and child predators and you get the idea.
The addiction is the big one, the root of all evil. “Maximizing engagement” is destroying civilization. But I digress.
Back in the 90s, nobody talked about this. Well not nobody but maybe this one person pissing into the hurricane. Discourse on the net and computing in general was 99.99% breathlessly positive bordering on delusional utopian.
We didn’t see it coming.
Nobody was talking about how this could go off the rails and do horrible things. Well almost nobody. I guess dystopian cyberpunk nailed some of it but it was too much in the realm of fiction. It wasn’t part of the real world discourse which was all Mondo 2000 and early Wired and open source movement and PC industry optimism.
So ironically all the anti AI discourse makes me cautiously more optimistic about AI. We are talking about the risks, the downsides, the ways it could go majorly bad. Maybe we will notice if it does and correct. If we’d done that with the net, noticed that maybe addictionmaxxing apps and sites was going to work “too well” or that flattening the discourse to 140 characters would harm the collective mind, things might be a little better today.
Even if we go in with one eye a little open and correct a little bit, that could make a big difference. Could have with the net too.
I can buy the idea that AIs are making people a lot lazier intellectually, on average.
But I do think that for the atypical user that is "information-hungry," AIs are a massive productivity booster. I've probably asked ChatGPT 1,000 questions over the last 2 years that I otherwise would have needed to spend 15+ minutes researching. Prior to AI, I would have just... not spent the time looking them up.
The danger is just when you start using AI but otherwise continue doing exactly what you were doing before.
I know you’re trying to be clever and critical (boy am I tired of this trope on HN) but no, I don’t agree.
Being curious about a lot of things doesn’t mean you’re willing to invest 15 minutes every time you have a question.
AI makes the cost of asking these questions functionally zero. Previously I’d ask maybe 1/10 of them on Reddit, get a smartass negative answer, if I get an answer at all. Now I have an assistant that answers an infinite number of questions on demand.
I suspect that a lot of AI-hostility from tech/nerdy people is because they don't have the ability to display their expertise as easily as they did on Stack Overflow/Reddit/etc. A huge percentage of comments on HN are still just people trying to display their knowledge. (And I'm very guilty of that as well.)
That's a lot of leaping to conclusions based on a small criticism.
I'm rather tired, personally, of the HN trope of people saying that AI is bad for/mis-used by everyone except a carefully-defined group that consists of exactly them.
If you're curious now only with AI, I'd say that makes you less curious--"intellectually hungry"--than the people who were curious before, without AI. It's great that you feel you can be more curious now, but I wouldn't be so quick to declare yourself superior to others with no more evidence than that you use AI the same amount.
Count me in. I rejected my promotion (losing 2x gain in salary) from sysadmin to developer at my work exactly because of AI that ate it alive during the last year.
Our devs have been outright complaining about getting dumb, losing touch with the codebase and getting lost in weekly switching between models/agents that have been gushing as if from a firehose, but the management (read investors) knows better and there's a culture of self-censoring the opposition to AI among employees.
There are various approaches toward AI. Some are radical. I often found extremism to be wrong in most cases.
I have a suspicion that people who reject AI related stuff is just scared under the hood. They fight against AI because of the fear against loosing job, money, or control.
There were many manual jobs. Lets say carpenters. They had manually created things, often pieces of art. Now many things are soulless, created by factory output, and by robots. It is true that we lost some artistry. It is true that every line of code will not be a work of art. There is no going back though. Adapt.
I must again point out that we're not even certain yet that we're "losing" any programming capability, and we're not certain the tradeoff isn't worth it.
All of these arguments presuppose we're losing something that's not worth losing.
I want someone to start one square earlier and argue to me why that matters. I've read enough of these "your skills are atrophying!" arguments; I'm also making like 10x as much revenue as I did through a business that delights my clients. Why should I care about my "skills" if I'm still able to make money, pursue hobbies, and enjoy life?
I think there's a key difference of perspective hidden in your response. You're a business owner; you sell outcomes to your customers. Even if we suppose that skill atrophy is real, it's easy to see how that tradeoff would be worth it to you, and not to someone who is an individual contributor in a corporate environment. For an IC in a corporate environment, the accumulation of portable skills is an important part of what makes the job worthwhile.
For what it's worth: I went freelance right around the time that agents were starting to become extremely capable, and I've never enjoyed my work more. I'd believe the claim that my hands-on coding skills are atrophying to some degree, but I'm also developing other skills that have much higher leverage in my new setting.
> "hands-on coding skills are atrophying to some degree"
It really depends on how you define "coding", right? Throughout my career coding meant many different things. In the beginning, coding was really Assembly. Then it became C. Then C++/OOP. Then Java/C# and managed memory languages. Then Python etc.
These languages aren't the same thing with different syntax. The details that matter in the act of "coding" changed dramatically. It really went from "bit thinking" in the assembly era to stitching open source libraries in the Python era. Many would excel in one paradigm but not the other.
Coding with AI requires a different set of skills. I see the proper command of AIs through prompts and human-made specs as hand coding as much as building line-by-line micro algorithms in Assembly.
I think the noise in this discussion comes from putting vibe coding and AI-assisted coding in the same bucket. I'd argue that pure vibe coding is perhaps the one thing that doesn't resemble traditional coding as much. But the AI coding approach where people gradually build applications through the accumulation of components and layers built with heavy AI assistance is hand coding.
I can see that relying on AI assistance for too long could atrophy the skill of manual line-by-line mental model transcription, but I never really cared too much for this skill. Once I have the right data structures and algorithms in my head, actually entering the if, else, class, struct, for, etc statements are a giant annoyance.
For some of us, "enjoy life" necessitates having some care and craftsmanship in the work we're doing 40 hours per week. People liked this job. Now it's becoming just a job.
Imagine a Michelin chef who previously invented delicious menus but whose boss has declared he now can only serve microwaved Sysco food. The revenue for some reason hasn't decreased. Why should he care about his "skills" if he's still able to make money, pursue hobbies, and enjoy life? I think that should be obvious here.
All I’m seeing is mediocre or inexperienced coders executing at a similar level to traditional coders, with traditional coders not liking it. Im guessing this is similar to any situation where new tech replacing old tech, and old tech potentially empire building to protect themselves with articles like “resist the helpful new technology!”
"A real experiment: “Devise an honest AI experiment in your department, measuring real costs and real benefits. Try, honestly, to find all the flaws with this AI stuff.”
This does not seem like a honest framing of an experiment... Wouldn't that be to create a true trial to assess strengths and weaknesses, or to figure out in what ways AI is effective for your team as a tool?
There is your problem. You're making a case against technology that you don't understand. You haven't fixed esoteric bugs using AI or created whole new applications with AI. You haven't seen AI building new functionality in minutes instead of days of manual labor, at even better code quality.
Replace the word "AI" with Television/radio/internet/railways and you see how ridiculous this blog is.
94 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 4.4 ms ] threadThey obviously shouldn't be doing it like that, but since clean water is cheap and business in absence of reason optimizes for lowest costs that's exactly what they did.
But what concerns me is that authors of articles such as this feel no need to differentiate themselves from other anti-technology arguments in history.
The argument usually isn't "I believe X will not happen," it's usually either "I believe X should not happen" or "I believe we should manage how X happens".
Why should they? Other "anti-tech" arguments include
- Concern about global warming/pollution
- Resistance to nuclear/chemical warfare
It's not just, or even primarily, that anti-tech arguments are the equivalent of 'cameras will steal souls'.
Additionally, when it comes to the software field, it will be sure way of selecting yourself out of the work pool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--bH6O2_Vvk
i'm ok with that
I feel compelled to point out that Kagi does offer AI-backed answers if you want it to. Just pose your query with a question mark to trigger the AI response in addition to the usual search results. It is not ever the default or only answer, and I pray Kagi keeps it that way!
I use the AI option more often than I thought I would, usually for things that I don't consider controversial or complicated.
But we as individual consumers have more power than we think. We don't need to use these AI features and products. We've survived perfectly fine without AI. Made plenty of scientific discoveries and lead enriched lives without it.
The biggest "fuck you" to the pricks who pushed this on us would be if we collectively went "meh".
AI are here, is it going to demolish and (maybe) reconstruct the world as we know it, trying to avoid it it's just silly. There is no sane world where we can "stop AI", even if every single researcher were to do vanish tomorrow and the hardware and schematics magically gone, it would still only be a stopgap.
So...What are you trying to achieve?
Sure we can't stop the technology, but we _can_ stop the importance and money heaped into it.
https://caiml.org/dighum/dighum-manifesto/
Likewise, arguments that other countries will have it therefore we must have it, are specious. Some countries have nukes, we don't let every country have them, we certainly don't let citizens have them; some countries produce CP, we don't let citizens access it; some countries have millions of guns among citizens, we don't let the guns cross the border. All this is to say that it would not be infeasible to broadly ban AI in most contexts. Obviously this won't happen in the current political climate, but it's not a law of the universe that AI pervading daily life is inevitable.
Id wager that they would fare the same. The time saved on some tasks are outweighed by extra time spent on others. Everyone assumes that just because you can pump out more features, you're more successful.
workers that feel powerless and dont try to resist is great news for rulers who only serve to generate revenue.
Class warfare is nice to write about, but there's been 0 credible approaches in the last 2 years proposed. Do you think it will magically appear sometime? Are we generally prepared to stand with our less experienced colleagues? and immigrants?
CMIIW
Because it was trained unethically we have a few moral obligations:
1) USE IT. Do not let only unethical people use a force amplifier on our collective efforts.
2) STOP PUBLISHING HUMAN GENERATED CONTENT. The more original human thought = the more they harvest our thinking.
3) Generate only known things in novel combinations. Do not provide new insights.
I could go on but strategically thinking AI is not going to be stopped in the way you are thinking. So you need to think a bit deeper on methods of optimizing the situation.
Copyright violation is not theft
That said, I also think everyone who contributed content online deserves to be rewarded for their contribution, especially since OpenAI (which made the largest contribution) was a non-profit in the beginning. So there should be some kind of tax. Otherwise I agree, it's not ethical. It's not 'fair use' of copyrights.
Because none of what you said is true.
Listening to developers complain about AI doing things to their life and the world at large when they have spent the past 30 years automating just about everyone else they could out of a job (Since this has been one of the primary uses of software) is ... something else. It sounds like a a a mix of hubris, arrogance, cognitive dissonance, ignorance, etc.
Only when it started to affect their world did any developers start to care, and even then nobody seems to ever stop and say "hey what were we doing the past 30 years, maybe we should think about this", it's instead "hey look at what these other people are doing with AI, someone should think about this".
In fact, we already pretty much have proof of this: devs didn't care when software destroyed the journalism industry twenty years ago. Turns out that people ultimately only care when their only jobs are on the line.
I would care if even these machines could only write articles, and I cared when software destroyed multiple forms of media delivery.
I won't say it was all bad, unequivocally, but it made me sad and I tried to think of solutions.
Turns out, alas, that make people are willing to trade away freedom, independence, privacy, and a functioning culture to save a few bucks and get dopamine hits on demand.
For the pet projects, it’s not really a big deal. I’m the only user, and I as the user don’t care how it works under the hood.
Work is a different story. I have never felt more disconnected from my work than in the last 6-8 months. It takes a huge mental toll to read into our code and figure stuff out, almost like I just got hired and I’m working on new code for the first time. I’m asked to read “specs” written by LLMs that are unintelligible and I find my brain disconnecting immediately. Tickets, also written by LLMs pose the same problem.
I’m asking teammates questions because I want their answer and I’m told to just ask Claude.
None of this feels good, it may be where the industry is heading but as a professional it feels wrong.
also, take some fucking pride in your work.
Then if people send you slop you can either point them to the guidelines or, if they don't stop, report them for violating workplace rules and make them suffer.
Code reviews come back with a ream of issues that I just want to scream "I don't give a fuck".
Pre-LLM no-one would have cared that if another class was configured differently ( it isn't ) and called the new class in a different way ( it doesn't ), that you'd in some race-condition occasionally leak a resource, but only on shutdown when the program is about to terminate anyway.
That's the kind of issue that claude loves to find and write up in a code review with the exact same verbiage and write up style as if it had just found a naive SQL injection from string concatenation.
Prior to LLMs I doubt anyone would even have spotted the first issue, let alone bothered to write it up.
But instead it's another round of review, another round of trying to decipher the LLM's comments to discover whether it's a meaningful problem or a nothingburger.
And it's all so tiring.
PRs review more quickly when you have human written spec diffs to orient you and guide (or skip) the code review.
a danger to avoid is writing specs which are basically just really bad code (prose is terrible code). you can work towards patterns to avoid this pitfall.
either way, find the human layer and dont use LLMs there. make all the important decisions in the spec, delegate the other decisions to the LLM.
i believe this is the new craft.
that said, i expect a small but significant exodus from software. a lotta folks came for the "programming" that is now being outsourced. were becoming so tired, just absolutely burning out.
i hope we will eventually realize its time to go, instead of giving up our souls.
> I do not come to you with clean hands. > I am not here to dictate morality
These two things contradict eachother.
> My primary focus here will be software development > Environmental Harm > Stanley Tucci
These three things also contradict eachother.
> If we lived in a post-scarcity
Maybe this is your real problem, and you're just confusing cause and effect.
> We need to resist “AI” so that thousands, perhaps millions of people do not die
Hyperbole.
> Look up the “Eliza effect”. Even the weakest conceivable program like this was seductive. These new ones are masters of seduction.
Sounds like software development alright.
This person has a familiar name, I'm sure he is amazing at something. This blog is not the peak of his work.
EDIT:
> I quote “AI” to emphasize that these things are not intelligent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
The Anti's have been cranking up their submissions of this junk lately.
But I think it's important for the quality of public discourse that we forward only the best, strongest arguments for any given position (whether I personally agree with that position or not). A weak argument gives unnecessary purchase to unscrupulous haters who might use that weaker argument as a low-grade "straw man" to dismiss the whole position.
So with that preamble, some constructive criticism (very well-intentioned):
> I am not exaggerating: We need to resist “AI” so that thousands, perhaps millions of people do not die.
On this one you are, in fact, exaggerating (certainly with "millions," likely with "thousands" as well).
The overwhelming majority of people who lose their job for whatever reason (and there are many reasons, not just this one issue) fall back on a support network of their family and friends while they "get back on their feet" by pivoting to another job or form of employment (sometimes branching into entrepreneurship, for example).
The alternative to employment at whatever FAANG or FAANG-adjacent company someone was laid off from is not "death." It is typically "some, sometimes quite significant, discomfort." Granted "AI Layoffs" are starting to ripple out beyond FAANG, but the story is similar in other industries.
If "layoffs kill people" is the moral hill we choose to plant our flag on, then mustn't we also campaign with equal vociferousness against all the other causes of layoffs in general? Since to do otherwise is to sit by while those laid off allegedly die in droves of thousands or perhaps millions?
It also occurs to me that this framing ("AI causes layoffs") also gives incompetent and unaccountable executives a pass by pinning the actual harm done by irresponsible layoffs (which to be clear, is not none!) on "the AI" rather than on the leaders who are in the positions to actually decide what happens in their organizations.
I think the argument is much stronger if we talk about the aggregate cost to humanity being paid in terms of displacement, life disruption, and curtailed opportunity (especially for juniors). We should not make the "toxic escalationism" move of equivocating things we don't like with negligent homicide, even if it makes for a punchy one-liner.
Oh man how did we ever survive calculators.
Excellent point. Thank you for writing such a cogent argument.
It is clear that the rich and powerful are making short-term decisions that are causing widespread and long-term harm. Decisions such as, AI-pilled investors demanding unsustainable productivity from companies, and CEOs in turn forcing employees to use agentic coding and laying the rest off.
Such decision-making is not new, of course, but LLM technology is helping grifters and con artists to turbo-charge it. Founders can raise money using cool demos that achieve the impossible. Investment analysts can back up their AI story with huge paper profits.
The result, as you summarized, is life and career displacement and missed opportunities for young people. It's just too abstract and diffuse of an impact to influence people with, and it also seems to be railing against the holy cow of Capitalism.
"Data centers bad!", or "AI is disrupting humanity and the end is nigh!" are much more punchy slogans.
For some reason HN readers love this sort of content, largely by periphery players who mostly think it gives them an angle for clicks. And, I mean, as someone who uses lots of AI to delight clients and stay competitive, you be you. It leaves more for me.
I had to google him to even figure out why he's relevant (his About Me on the linked site is literally "I’m Ron Jeffries, the same old one. This is my new site. It’s where all my new articles will go" very helpful smh.) Xtreme Programming? When was that last relevant, 20 years ago?
AI companies are racing to build empires on products built on the whole of human writing, charging rent to access it, then leveraging their scale to improve the model.
the big data era was a gold rush for greed. the AI era is has upgraded to a warp engine for greed.
the harms and manipulation of social media took ages to enter the social discourse, and are just now turning into legal action.
AIs warp-engine speed guarantees greed will fuel warp-engine scale harm before society catches up, and before America's greedy ass politicians are cornered into trying to do something.
resist fucking greed. if you gotta use LLMs, at least don't pay an AI company.
At the same time, maybe I shouldn’t, and I sometimes find all the AI skeptic and even doomer discourse heartening.
We really messed up with the Internet. I’m an Xennial and I had a minor role in it but I was there and it feels like the Internet was “our project.” I was literally born with the PC, discovered BBSes as a tween and the pre web Internet as a teen.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the net is bad. I think it’s more positive than not (still). But my god the addiction and disinformation and brain rot and propaganda and child predators and you get the idea.
The addiction is the big one, the root of all evil. “Maximizing engagement” is destroying civilization. But I digress.
Back in the 90s, nobody talked about this. Well not nobody but maybe this one person pissing into the hurricane. Discourse on the net and computing in general was 99.99% breathlessly positive bordering on delusional utopian.
We didn’t see it coming.
Nobody was talking about how this could go off the rails and do horrible things. Well almost nobody. I guess dystopian cyberpunk nailed some of it but it was too much in the realm of fiction. It wasn’t part of the real world discourse which was all Mondo 2000 and early Wired and open source movement and PC industry optimism.
So ironically all the anti AI discourse makes me cautiously more optimistic about AI. We are talking about the risks, the downsides, the ways it could go majorly bad. Maybe we will notice if it does and correct. If we’d done that with the net, noticed that maybe addictionmaxxing apps and sites was going to work “too well” or that flattening the discourse to 140 characters would harm the collective mind, things might be a little better today.
Even if we go in with one eye a little open and correct a little bit, that could make a big difference. Could have with the net too.
But I do think that for the atypical user that is "information-hungry," AIs are a massive productivity booster. I've probably asked ChatGPT 1,000 questions over the last 2 years that I otherwise would have needed to spend 15+ minutes researching. Prior to AI, I would have just... not spent the time looking them up.
The danger is just when you start using AI but otherwise continue doing exactly what you were doing before.
> Prior to AI, I would have just... not spent the time looking them up.
You're putting yourself in the group of people who are 'information-hungry', but your own evidence suggests that's not the case.
Being curious about a lot of things doesn’t mean you’re willing to invest 15 minutes every time you have a question.
AI makes the cost of asking these questions functionally zero. Previously I’d ask maybe 1/10 of them on Reddit, get a smartass negative answer, if I get an answer at all. Now I have an assistant that answers an infinite number of questions on demand.
I suspect that a lot of AI-hostility from tech/nerdy people is because they don't have the ability to display their expertise as easily as they did on Stack Overflow/Reddit/etc. A huge percentage of comments on HN are still just people trying to display their knowledge. (And I'm very guilty of that as well.)
I'm rather tired, personally, of the HN trope of people saying that AI is bad for/mis-used by everyone except a carefully-defined group that consists of exactly them.
If you're curious now only with AI, I'd say that makes you less curious--"intellectually hungry"--than the people who were curious before, without AI. It's great that you feel you can be more curious now, but I wouldn't be so quick to declare yourself superior to others with no more evidence than that you use AI the same amount.
Our devs have been outright complaining about getting dumb, losing touch with the codebase and getting lost in weekly switching between models/agents that have been gushing as if from a firehose, but the management (read investors) knows better and there's a culture of self-censoring the opposition to AI among employees.
I have a suspicion that people who reject AI related stuff is just scared under the hood. They fight against AI because of the fear against loosing job, money, or control.
There were many manual jobs. Lets say carpenters. They had manually created things, often pieces of art. Now many things are soulless, created by factory output, and by robots. It is true that we lost some artistry. It is true that every line of code will not be a work of art. There is no going back though. Adapt.
All of these arguments presuppose we're losing something that's not worth losing.
I want someone to start one square earlier and argue to me why that matters. I've read enough of these "your skills are atrophying!" arguments; I'm also making like 10x as much revenue as I did through a business that delights my clients. Why should I care about my "skills" if I'm still able to make money, pursue hobbies, and enjoy life?
I just don't think it's that serious.
For what it's worth: I went freelance right around the time that agents were starting to become extremely capable, and I've never enjoyed my work more. I'd believe the claim that my hands-on coding skills are atrophying to some degree, but I'm also developing other skills that have much higher leverage in my new setting.
It really depends on how you define "coding", right? Throughout my career coding meant many different things. In the beginning, coding was really Assembly. Then it became C. Then C++/OOP. Then Java/C# and managed memory languages. Then Python etc.
These languages aren't the same thing with different syntax. The details that matter in the act of "coding" changed dramatically. It really went from "bit thinking" in the assembly era to stitching open source libraries in the Python era. Many would excel in one paradigm but not the other.
Coding with AI requires a different set of skills. I see the proper command of AIs through prompts and human-made specs as hand coding as much as building line-by-line micro algorithms in Assembly.
I think the noise in this discussion comes from putting vibe coding and AI-assisted coding in the same bucket. I'd argue that pure vibe coding is perhaps the one thing that doesn't resemble traditional coding as much. But the AI coding approach where people gradually build applications through the accumulation of components and layers built with heavy AI assistance is hand coding.
I can see that relying on AI assistance for too long could atrophy the skill of manual line-by-line mental model transcription, but I never really cared too much for this skill. Once I have the right data structures and algorithms in my head, actually entering the if, else, class, struct, for, etc statements are a giant annoyance.
Imagine a Michelin chef who previously invented delicious menus but whose boss has declared he now can only serve microwaved Sysco food. The revenue for some reason hasn't decreased. Why should he care about his "skills" if he's still able to make money, pursue hobbies, and enjoy life? I think that should be obvious here.
This does not seem like a honest framing of an experiment... Wouldn't that be to create a true trial to assess strengths and weaknesses, or to figure out in what ways AI is effective for your team as a tool?
There is your problem. You're making a case against technology that you don't understand. You haven't fixed esoteric bugs using AI or created whole new applications with AI. You haven't seen AI building new functionality in minutes instead of days of manual labor, at even better code quality.
Replace the word "AI" with Television/radio/internet/railways and you see how ridiculous this blog is.