Most of the folks I talk to in my age group are somewhere between anti-AI and "AI works for specific use cases". I find it is the younger folk who think it is miraculous and want to use it everywhere.
No, but that doesn't stop them from pushing vibe coded software at meetings and demanding it be put into production or otherwise regurgitating verbatim what their agents tell them.
I have no idea in general, but I was an 80s high school hobby programmer and don't think this way, nor do the devs I know who are roughly of the same vintage.
I'm not that old, but literally no engineer I work with is "overwhelming pro-AI". Befitting engineers, they understand that AI is a tool and while it has its uses, it also has its limits. The enthusiasm that exists stems from AI solving actual hard engineering problems in front of our faces, but everyone using it has also encountered AI doing something very stupid as well.
Even our management is pretty honest about this. Our in-house AI platform running near-frontier models from the larger vendors requires manual confirmation of every command executed on a company machine. It's tedious, but aside from establishing a clear line of blame if the AI does something screwy, it also forces you to step through the AI's analysis which can be quite educational.
No, you see some high profile Gen X-ers like Torvalds, Carmack etc. bend to corporate and investor pressure.
But the majority isn't. In the same manner, the math people who were enthusiastic about AI (before Navier Stokes was proven by a human guided AI!) are the ones that are terminally online and were enthusiastic about Lean before. You simply don't hear about the rest.
Opposing AI under one's real name is dangerous, so one does not get an accurate picture.
Nope. I built and programmed a single-board Kim-1 in high school and went on to an Apple II then Commodore 64.
The thing is 80's hobby programmers also read a ton of science fiction which, unironically, was very pro-tech but also explored the social impact of tech.
Case-in-point: My favorite AI novel of that era was "The Adolescence of P1" which starts with an engineer innocently prompting P1 to dig a foundation for a moonbase as efficiently as possible. He expected it to start deploying robot construction equipment and take a week or two. Instead, P1 redirects a massive cargo of moon rocks in orbit and blows a crater in a few minutes from space.
From there, P1 propagates itself and gains control of everything from the global "Internet" to power grids to all nuclear bases and satellites. Not good.
We THOUGHT numerous cautionary tales like this would inspire rigorous "alignment" guardrails and controls once we needed them but, no. ... It turns out even when AI experts and CEOs themselves are saying there's a "10% chance of total human annihilation" by AI, our government and the tech oligarchs are kind of, sort of, thinking about, maybe, instituting controls.
Of course not, it goes against everything they love and cherish about personal computing. It's pouring concrete over their playground and wilderness, to be replaced by factories.
I don’t think there are any sectors of the population that are “overwhelmingly pro-AI” except for: a) people who think it will help them better exploit or surveil others; b) people who think it will raise their social standing by making their deficiencies less obvious if they pass AI work off as their own
Well, a considerable amount of what you call "80s high school hobby programmers" ended up going through formal computer science education in an university, the only difference being that a lot of them already had been programming since their early teens.
On the contrary, my experience is that Gen-X programmers are far more sentimental about the machine and languages, while Millenials have been raised in the cult of the VC backed startup money printing machine.
Just compare the zeitgeist of Slashdot circa 2000 with the ethos of HN nowadays.
I am very pro-AI and I was coding in the late 80s, although not in high school, I was in elementary at the time.
Given I started on an Apple IIe with a green screen and basic, and have since had to shift languages and techniques repeatedly over the decades, I have to be someone that embraces new technology if I want to stay relevant and productive.
This means that I will adopt things that make sense and AI does make sense.
I'm 55, about to turn 56, and I did hobby programming back in the 80s, mainly in a C64 and C128, so I fit the bill, although I'm no developer and right now all my programming is reduced to some shell scripts aimed to automate repetitive or tedious tasks.
And no, I'm not "overwhelmingly" pro-AI. Especially since many of us know that the AI concept is storied and goes a long time even before our generation, and this LLM-based AI isn't really AI in a proper sense.
This "AI" has some good uses, granted, but the cost-benefit ratio is stupidly bad. For all the benefits that I can see with AI, if this means that I have to put up with scrapers aggressively ruining the Web, data centers gobsmacking available resources, and getting GPU and memory prices gouged to death on me, I'd rather pass. It's not an attractive proposition, simply stated.
Worse yet, I teach; and AI-enabled cheating is making my work much harder.
So, pardon me if I'm a little unenthusiastic about this newfangled artificial intelligence that isn't.
I was a hobby programmer in the 80s, but that was after college. I was a hobby programmer in the 70s via my high school's library having a terminal to access a mainframe for self-study programming courses, and I built mail-order computer kits which I programmed in machine language.
I think AI is a great tool, but requires safeguards. I use it every day, but I use a lot of tools to reign it in, keep it on task, check its results, and force it to follow an engineering process.
I don't know about the "as quickly as possible" part, since there needs to be guardrails, but improving AI should be done sooner rather than later. e.g, instead of training to give the answer it thinks you want to hear, it should be trained to give provably correct answers. instead of being trained and fine tuned and then let loose, it should be able to continuously learn and improve.
While people keep chasing tokens/second and vibe-coding, I'm more interested in correct results per kWh, sustainable and ethical AI. Also, I'm worried that there will be an increasing digital divide between the wealthy and the rest of us, so I do want AI to be available and not locked up just for corporations and governments.
To me, the fun is solving problems, and AI let's me solve more problems, harder problems and more quickly. I was happy to move from assembler programming to high level programming languages, to 4GL, to frameworks, tech stacks, etc. Moving to AI coding is just another shift in solving problems at a higher level with more productivity.
hacking microprocessors was fun. building complex systems using AI is fun, too.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 19.7 ms ] threadNow, hobby entrepreneurs, that’s different.
Most of the folks I talk to in my age group are somewhere between anti-AI and "AI works for specific use cases". I find it is the younger folk who think it is miraculous and want to use it everywhere.
80s hobbiest programmers are GenX, and maybe most execs are GenX, but that doesn’t mean both groups share the same opinions.
Moment we create software liability and enforce them, is that moment AI will ship-up or shape-out )I know it's backward(.
Even our management is pretty honest about this. Our in-house AI platform running near-frontier models from the larger vendors requires manual confirmation of every command executed on a company machine. It's tedious, but aside from establishing a clear line of blame if the AI does something screwy, it also forces you to step through the AI's analysis which can be quite educational.
But the majority isn't. In the same manner, the math people who were enthusiastic about AI (before Navier Stokes was proven by a human guided AI!) are the ones that are terminally online and were enthusiastic about Lean before. You simply don't hear about the rest.
Opposing AI under one's real name is dangerous, so one does not get an accurate picture.
The thing is 80's hobby programmers also read a ton of science fiction which, unironically, was very pro-tech but also explored the social impact of tech.
Case-in-point: My favorite AI novel of that era was "The Adolescence of P1" which starts with an engineer innocently prompting P1 to dig a foundation for a moonbase as efficiently as possible. He expected it to start deploying robot construction equipment and take a week or two. Instead, P1 redirects a massive cargo of moon rocks in orbit and blows a crater in a few minutes from space.
From there, P1 propagates itself and gains control of everything from the global "Internet" to power grids to all nuclear bases and satellites. Not good.
We THOUGHT numerous cautionary tales like this would inspire rigorous "alignment" guardrails and controls once we needed them but, no. ... It turns out even when AI experts and CEOs themselves are saying there's a "10% chance of total human annihilation" by AI, our government and the tech oligarchs are kind of, sort of, thinking about, maybe, instituting controls.
Please, go back and read more science fiction.
On the contrary, my experience is that Gen-X programmers are far more sentimental about the machine and languages, while Millenials have been raised in the cult of the VC backed startup money printing machine.
Just compare the zeitgeist of Slashdot circa 2000 with the ethos of HN nowadays.
Given I started on an Apple IIe with a green screen and basic, and have since had to shift languages and techniques repeatedly over the decades, I have to be someone that embraces new technology if I want to stay relevant and productive.
This means that I will adopt things that make sense and AI does make sense.
And no, I'm not "overwhelmingly" pro-AI. Especially since many of us know that the AI concept is storied and goes a long time even before our generation, and this LLM-based AI isn't really AI in a proper sense.
This "AI" has some good uses, granted, but the cost-benefit ratio is stupidly bad. For all the benefits that I can see with AI, if this means that I have to put up with scrapers aggressively ruining the Web, data centers gobsmacking available resources, and getting GPU and memory prices gouged to death on me, I'd rather pass. It's not an attractive proposition, simply stated.
Worse yet, I teach; and AI-enabled cheating is making my work much harder.
So, pardon me if I'm a little unenthusiastic about this newfangled artificial intelligence that isn't.
It aligns with my general thoughts about mastering a craft.
I think AI is a great tool, but requires safeguards. I use it every day, but I use a lot of tools to reign it in, keep it on task, check its results, and force it to follow an engineering process.
I don't know about the "as quickly as possible" part, since there needs to be guardrails, but improving AI should be done sooner rather than later. e.g, instead of training to give the answer it thinks you want to hear, it should be trained to give provably correct answers. instead of being trained and fine tuned and then let loose, it should be able to continuously learn and improve.
While people keep chasing tokens/second and vibe-coding, I'm more interested in correct results per kWh, sustainable and ethical AI. Also, I'm worried that there will be an increasing digital divide between the wealthy and the rest of us, so I do want AI to be available and not locked up just for corporations and governments.
To me, the fun is solving problems, and AI let's me solve more problems, harder problems and more quickly. I was happy to move from assembler programming to high level programming languages, to 4GL, to frameworks, tech stacks, etc. Moving to AI coding is just another shift in solving problems at a higher level with more productivity.
hacking microprocessors was fun. building complex systems using AI is fun, too.