It seems like a very lazy attempt to rebut the reasons. In particular:
"In this situation it isn’t the technology that takes the job, it’s the mode of production. And given that programming is intellectual work, the means of production is literally our heads, we ought to be able to seize those."
The word 'ought' is doing so much heavy lifting here...
I don't understand the point of this article. It is written poorly. It doesn't state a purpose or line of thought, you can infer it from how he counters the dislike reasons, but then was the point of the article just to list a handful of reasons you don't believe to be true? Because he's leaving so much stuff behind
Fair enough, it's a blog post and not intended to be comprehensive. But it does feel like you only listed these arguments just to knock them them down.
I don't like AI coding, but I can't say it's not useful. Most of the arguments in this article can be disarmed by taking the abstraction "one step up". LLM generated modules and software, microservices, whatever your level of abstraction... now need to be composited together. You go and deal with higher order problems, factories, generation, etc.
Is it a way to develop critical bits of code, depths of your business logic? Absolutely not. Can it solve a lot of boilerplate and support logic? Absolutely yes.
Seeing "AI Companies as Bad Actors"... can't fully disagree there. There's far too many far too dodgy things about these businesses, and I trust them as far as I can audit them (not very far). And the missing argument's the cognitive decline of using these things to think for us. I try to keep myself sharp by still manually doing a fair amount of things in my life. I refuse to automate _everything_ - especially the stuff I do for fun. Having an LLM manage hobby-adjacent stuff is a quick trip to burnout land, especially once fixing the thing becomes "the hobby"... and it does.
I think the employment thief point is always misstated.
We invented compilers, word processors, templated document generation, code generators, DSLs and things like that which were all labour reduction technologies for describing systems and information. These were net positives for society but wiped out full administrative and technical professions.
The issue is the impact that technology has on society. It should used to free up more time for enriching humanity with art, music, sciences, mathematics etc. But what really happens is they are used entirely for concentrating wealth by taking revenue and reducing employment, leaving functional people unemployed, destitute and in debt to the people who have the wealth concentration.
At this point it's morally objectionable on all grounds.
A second point, which should be considered an addition to the article is that AI coding shapes thinking based on its capabilities, not the user's intent. I see this a lot. If the objective is to do thing X because it aligns with a well-researched strategic analysis, it may not align with that. People are happy to be pushed to do thing Y which is a totally different thing because they are being slowly gaslit into accepting the mediocrity that the model promotes. This leads to poor business outcomes. And all this is hidden and written off because everyone needs to be seen as AI thought leaders at a high level because that's what keeps the stock going up and engineers are being rated on delivery, not on ROI.
> A second point, which should be considered an addition to the article is that AI coding shapes thinking based on its capabilities, not the user's intent.
which is precisely why this tech has become so invasive in the software industry, the majority's thinking capabilities were mediocre to begin with. Good code was held in place by a few good men and women working as tech leads.
I am also tired of the "We now have bigger picture problems to solve instead". If your code looked like spaghetti, so are your big picture solutions. As a matter of fact, big picture problems are much harder than writing a stupid function.
I am not sure if I am more tired of people building with AI or people complaining about people building with AI. If you really that bothered, there is nothing stoping anybody from keep doing things the good old way... What's the big deal?
They’re looking for reassurance to avoid fear. The same way we all do when we see that someone has been in a freak auto accident, we try and find some way to tell ourselves “oh, that wouldn’t happen to me”
The desire to play middlemen, put wrappers around everything, to abolish consent is both implicit as well as sometimes even explicit in what people pushing this stuff say and do.
It doesn't really help us improve our code, which wouldn't just be "creating a lot of it really easily", but refactoring existing things. Not just performance, readability, variable and function names and how it's all structured, all the artsy fartsy craftsmanship stuff. Docs that are more readable and more concise. That would be "building" or "development" worth the name.
In other words, the longer we would massage and work on our code with actually beneficial "AI", the better off we would be on the day all models have an outage. Instead of the other way around, and the direction is less expertise, less autonomy, less self-mastery, and also less community, because everybody just makes "their" version of whatever, taking from others instead of collaborating with them.
And all that is on top of the "robbery" that it still is. It's taking what humans made so far, uses it against us, and destroys the "junior pipeline" or however you want to call it. Speaking of, since someone on HN said the comments on https://www.cringely.com/2026/07/16/the-auditors-opinion/ were interesting, I read them, and here's one:
> One of the sadder knock-on effects of the current AI bubble has been how hordes of elderly people are desperately clinging to chatbots as some kind of “miracle cure” that will fulfill all their dreams and fantasies while also saving them from loneliness. I know at least two older people in real life who are suffering from this delusion to some extent.
> The younger people, meanwhile, tend to reject generative AI as “slop” and treat it with the disdain it deserves.
> This is a curious inversion of every other technological breakthrough in human history. In my lifetime, I’ve witnessed the dawn of both personal computers and the Internet, and I’ve seen young people (including myself) get very excited about the possibilities of both. It’s just SO WEIRD to be in the early stages of a new technology that everyone (except old people, evil billionaires, and the usual group of grifters) is kinda meh about.
> I don’t know what that means, but I don’t think it’s a good sign.
First, if someone's profession has been vastly transformed, and not necessarily in pleasant ways, they're allowed to have feelings about that. If nothing else, I find talking to AIs to be exhausting.
But more importantly, sure, we were always paid for results. And yes, sometimes professions transform or die. The buggy whip manufacturers aren't doing that great these days. But people are also allowed to have feelings about losing their professions.
My real concern is that the stated goal of the AI companies is to do this to every human job. They want to replace programmers and artists and movie-makers and—as soon as they get robotics figured out—physical laborers. They measure the ability of their models to run entire retail businesses with Vending Bench, so management isn't safe, either. They sell their AIs to the military for use in weapons. No job is safe, anywhere: They want everything, if they can figure out how to take it.
If the current rate of AI advance stops really soon, then eventually we'll figure out some kind of liveable future. Probably one with fewer programmers. But the labs have zero intention of stopping. Anthropic is a cult, and they hope to build a machine god that will have power over humanity forever. So I'm not going to them for answers. OpenAI used to have non-profit oversight that encouraged them to serve society, and Sam Altman gutted it like a fish. So I don't think I trust them to design a machine that replaces all human jobs, either.
Personally, I don't mind current coding models, at least not the local-sized ones that exist now. They make nice sounding boards and can be trusted with the grunt work. We could adapt to these, given time.
But so far, AI technology shows no sign of stopping. And the labs are focused heavily on coding and math, because the next step in their plan is to let their models do AI research so that they can advance their technology even faster into new fields.
We could, like, decide that we don't need to do this. There is no need to try to replace every single human job with a super human machine. Because if you thought the enshittification of the Internet was bad, wait until you see the enshittification of a machine that can do almost every human job. No thanks.
False, Sam Altman has repeatedly said that he doesn't want AI to automate everything and that AI will destroy jobs and bring different, new types of jobs.
But if AI can do everything we can do and better, its strange to argue that we still deserve to do that job. Who will pay you and why would they pay you if they can get it done cheaper? Why do you deserve to be paid higher wages when it can be done easily and better by something else?
> Sam Altman has repeatedly said that he doesn't want AI to automate everything and that AI will destroy jobs and bring different, new types of jobs.
Sam Altman says a lot of things, most of which seem to benefit Sam Altman. And Google used to tell me that they wouldn't be evil. Facebook probably said some noble-sounding nonsense at some point, too.
> Why do you deserve to be paid higher wages when it can be done easily and better by something else?
I mean, this is exactly what happened to the Neanderthals: We could do every job better than they could, and now there are no more Neanderthals. So I wouldn't like a future where two companies make machines that outcompete humans at every job.
Which is why I say we can adapt to this, but only if it stops advancing soon.
Yeah - What Sam Altman says has nothing to do with what he really thinks and everything with what will get him ahead. It would be very naive to take anything that he says at face value.
> First, if someone's profession has been vastly transformed, and not necessarily in pleasant ways, they're allowed to have feelings about that
Of all the things that rile me up in this current landscape, the pervasive tone of "why aren't you happy? I'm happy! You should be happy about this" is the most infuriating.
I like coding. You can take away my AWK and C, Bash and Go and Javascript (yes I even enjoy coding Javascript unironically, sue me. I like making self-contained HTML5 one-file-and-offline tools for fun) only from my cold, dead hands. But don't we get one of these articles like once a week at least? It's getting kind of tiresome.
Like, I get the idea, I really do, but is there a need to announce it to the winds so often? Is this a pride thing?
Same here, regardless of my endless C rants, if the option is writing markdown files for a machine to do my work, or be stuck writing C until retirement age, I pick writing C.
It's one person's personal blog. You can complain that you see too many of one type of blog entry, but that's a result of whatever happens to be upvoted.
Like, I'd be tempted to write something like this just to crystallise the stance in my own head (i.e. writing is thinking) but if it got voted to the top of the front page, that doesn't mean I suddenly meant it as a world-bending thesis.
1. I think most of us know the same thing is occurred when first compile came into the market (Most of them hated it saying 'High Quality ASM code would be only generated by humans' . Moving forward asm hasn't dead but we are only using it only at critically.
I think we will do same with LLMs we use what useful and Move forward.
2. Life's isn't just always staying in front of a box and writing some code. If AI does the job of creating useful code with quality i would be more than happy since i could get start to work on more abstract things like Arts and Humanity. which for our growth is essential as you can see the current society is currently disdain.
Finally to conclude don't try to interrupt the flow just accept it and move forward.
1. No because a compiler solves a problem introduced by multiple architectures, it's NOT automatically a higher language. Also its deterministic. If you run the same version compiler, same flags, the result will always be the same and is guaranteed to do (maybe optimized) what you told it to do.
2. Good for you and i wont criticize this take. My life is A LOT about sitting in front of a computer writing useful and/or fun code though and i love it!
- Beside that never every compiler run costs money, like it is with AI.
- Beside that AI sometimes generate working code, sometimes just not and you can't change that.
- Beside that in a compiler language you can exactly explain what you want and the compiler generates appropriate lower code, show me that with AI and any human language without writing more lines of code as description than code.
Code can be art, code can also be simply a tool to reach a goal.
If you want to create art, do it with your own two hands and your brain.
If you want to just Do The Thing, codegen it. No one cares. In before "Except your users having to use your vibeslop" FYI your Hand-Crafted Artisanal Code will still have bugs, so it's a moot point.
Heck, the very first thing the author does is links to another one of his own blog post where the above points are explicitly stated and explained, then restates at the end of the paragraph that there are no valid arguments for this one. So why keep beating this dead horse? Especially as the opener of the article.
I agree with your thinking as well. Then, could you possibly critique my thoughts too? It seems like you and I think similarly, and I’m curious whether my logic is consistent.
I skimmed through your article, and I'll address the bolded points
> being able to understand code by reading it is different from being able to do that same modeling yourself starting from a blank screen
That is simply Domain Knowledge. In a specific context, be it a Framework or an App or a Platform or Infrastructure or whatever else, you have to understand it. Of course, if you start from zero and you build it from scratch yourself, you have pretty much the best DK you can have.
That is usually not the case though. If you have external collaborators of any kind, your DK is always challenged. I find myself often dumped into Domains from which I have to gather Knowledge to understand. And, for me personally, having to read code written by an AI, especially now that they've gotten smart enough to not make glaringly stupid errors, is MUCH better than having to read Hand Crafted Code that has been handslopped (yes, I'm going to coin that term now) to meet Deadlines. Shortcuts, hacks, you name it. Terrible codebase sins, accumulated as years, even DECADES of "we'll fix it later".
Of course it's a pain. It always has been. Back in the GPT 4 / Claude 4 days, AI generated code was atrocious, but that is not the case anymore.
The rest of the article, especially these bolded points:
> The weight shifts from the ability to produce directly to the ability to evaluate output and set direction.
> So in the AI era, productivity is increasingly limited by the speed of judgment rather than the speed of writing.
> A manager who steps away from the front line may, over time, lose the ability to perform the work they are managing.
> does being able to evaluate code mean the same thing as owning the mental model of that program?
Are SPOT ON. You can vibeslop anything at the speed of light. But if you don't have the knowledge, taste, and expertise to not lose track of your DK so that it doesn't become an unmanageable mess, it's going to bite you in the proverbial ass.
But, again, that has always been true!
How is the code that was vibeslopped by ChatGPT in 1 minute different from the Junior Dev who spent a week handslopping a new type of wheel? The only difference is quality and speed.
And you need expertise to be able to recognize when something is wrong, and keep your DK updated at scale.
agree.
1) business does not care. Users do not care. they see the result.
2) you can still reason with AI about best practices and nth level of abstraction for an interface that will never be extended more than once.
do what you will. CNCs did not remove need for artisans.
> business does not care. Users do not care. they see the result.
Sure, but with LLMs you get a bad result with more bugs and greater fragility. People will care about that even if they don't care per se about the craft.
I don't even think code can be art. It can be used to produce art, but it's not art itself. And the production of code can be, at most, a craft, which the output is not really art, like painting/a painting.
Hard disagree. The demoscene is entirely comprised of code that produces art, with insane tricks which are themselves art. Which sort of blurs the entire concept, as you can stretch this reasoning to kind of encompass anything, as per the pen and paper example you provided.
The thing about .kkreiger is that most of the size savings they got at the last minute were from extremely aggressive "dead code" elimination [1]. So, uhh, is the art really the code that was gutted by tools? Or is the art everything around the artifact?
seems as the question is, if one considers the process of creating an artwork art itself. i guess people finding ingenious ways to create art with code can be considered some form of performance art. it still feels a bit far-fetched to me, but that's just a personal feeling, and as you've said, it's subjective anyways. interesting to think about.
i'd immediately agree for code which looks like art by looking at it, so in cases where the code really is the art. i can also imagine that there's code which looks like art and "generates" it as well, so that seems like code as an artwork.
for cases where code was written/engineered well to create an artwork with the least amount of lines, i'd consider the generated artwork to be art, and the code the result of a competitive coding challenge. again, subjective.
when comparing it to other forms of art i'm not that sure. i've mentioned performance art, which feels a bit like the exception breaking the rule. there's conceptual art as well. is the act of painting art itself? is a photographer finding the optimal place to stand to take a picture art? almost starts to sound like an artwork vs. artform discussion.
Art was always recognizable as effort and discipline.
We talk a lot about the consumer side of this. Consumers will get tired of the creative output of AI. That it lacks soul. I agree.
But there is also the artist’s side. A craft that you dedicate decades to that’s now indistinguishable from someone who typed a couple sentences. This is a demoralizing place to be.
Me - an avid vibe coder (with 20 years of software development experience).
Opinion - this is next evolution. It will not go away. It bumped productivity 6x. Engineering does not go anywhere. SDLC is still a thing. Its just that C-suite can actively participate in development. Everything happens faster. We deliver more features.
Art is gone. Passion is gone. Its all just "work". I used to sit in a friday evening with a bottle(s) of beer and "develop for fun". write code, read new stuff.
Now it feels more like steering a ship. there are some guys throwing coal in the engine. I dont know them in face, but the ship goes forward, thats the main thing.
M.Twain "The report of my death was an exaggeration."
> Except that the job was never to type code, it was to deliver valuable software. People who can still do that can still get paid by organisations that need that to be done.
It's still the case that fewer people are required so I'm not sure this argument holds up. In the UK at least, entry-level software engineer roles down roughly 27% year-on-year after gpt was launched according to one article I saw.
There are a lot of similar articles to this recently, and there will be many more. There will also be many articles with the opposite view. Both are interesting and offer different viewpoints to what is the biggest software engineers' existential crisis.
I don't agree with this article but equally I respect their opinion. My primary reason I use AI is that a lot of coding is boring and has often made me wonder what I am doing with my life. At least now I am able to focus more on the parts of software development that interest me, shifting more of my time to the left of the development lifecycle: innovation and design
> AI Companies as Bad Actors
> If you believe that the big AI companies is [sic] run by people who don’t have humanity’s best interests at heart
I believe that AI companies (much like any other company) are primarily driven by financial motivations (note that this might not extend to the individual people working there). Now often this manifests in ways that serve humans or even humanity, but other times it doesn't. This isn't unique to AI companies, and if you tried to only support companies that put humanity over finances, you'd be hard pressed to find many.
> Motivated by Bertrand Meyer’s AI for Smarties, if you believe that software engineering is the careful application of the mysterious knowledge of software engineers, encapsulated in rules like the SOLID principles, “prefer composition over inheritance”, “use you’re type’s good“, the Law of Demeter and so on, then AI can’t possibly write software because it doesn’t apply those rules, it just generates text that happens to compile.
... is this the "LLMs don't truly understand what they are saying" of software engineering? I'd also say there is a case for re-evaluating some of the established engineering principles, considering that they were built on assumptions that are no longer true.
I like AI coding. I was talking about this with a writer friend: what I get paid for is my judgement. Which goals are worth pursuing and which aren't? We always knew tech is all tradeoffs all the way down, so how are they to be evaluated? My writer friend faces similar challenges. AI doesn't have an order of values within which to weigh judgements, except for whichever one is implicitly ir explicitly imposed upon it. I also don't think that LLM context works the same way my reflective process works, as far as I can tell. It's much better at the activity of coding than I am and that's great, I'm happy to let it do that. I've never found it capable of independently making the kinds of judgements that are the meat of my writer friend's and my professions.
I was curious about codeberg.org as an alternative to Github for opensource work. They had voted on an LLM policy and decided against vibe-coded repos while allowing some AI use. This got me thinking how I want to use AI and if it fit with their policy.
The best I could figure is that I like to start with requirements, use AI to discuss and settle on its high level design and specific aspects of its implementation. I may or may not read all the code, but the key thing is even if I didn't read the code in advance, doing so would not be a surprise and I'd know what it was doing and how it was doing it because those were things I decided during the up-front conversations and not left as an open exercise for the AI. And coming back to the codeberg.org vote I can guess that it was elements like these that they wanted to guard. They don't want repos whose owners don't know what the code does in a technical sense or how it's constructed etc. There's likely other things too like seeing text that doesn't read like people wrote it and I find that tiring to read (in a literal way, I get drained from reading too much of it) and endorse minimizing that.
Another thought was that my ever long search for better and better programming languages was that if I have a clear vision of what I want the language should have the least friction to write it down. Some languages that feel closer than others were Elm, Elixir, F#/OCaml, Pony, Rust, Kotlin, Go. Only a couple of these are my languages I'd regularly used but would prefer to have my AIs write in them. For web I'd probably also accept Vue, Svelte, or (simple) React. In particular using Go for mini back-ends is particularly effective as the coding style tends to be regular and boring which minimizes differences between human and machine written styles. So in a sense giving specs at multiple levels of abstraction and detail is the perfect high level language I'd been wanting.
I think this post's arguments are mostly flawed, but without getting into that, my problem with "AI" is that it's just fundamentally antisocial - it's built on using the work of billions of people in a way that they would not like it being used.* The defense is always "if you put it on the Internet, then you should be okay with people using it however they want", but that's just such a douchey defense, and the result is a world where fewer people want to share things on the Internet.
Anyway, it's cute that the author writes as if AI companies are only automating the "typing code" part and not the "delivering valuable software" part. They will automate everything that they can. Whatever special understanding or ability you think you have that the machine lacks, if it leads you to any amount of success, will be hoovered up into the machine for easy replication by anyone. That's why there's so much money in this - people aren't investing trillions just so that you can type less/no code.
* There are valid defenses for using work against the author's wishes - e.g., a racist shouldn't be able to stop people of other races from viewing their work. I just think these particular defenses are shit.
> I think this post's arguments are mostly flawed, but without getting into that, my problem with "AI" is that it's just fundamentally antisocial - it's built on using the work of billions of people in a way that they would not like it being used.
I think any argument like this has to contend with the fact that our entire industry is rife with projects we almost all support at least a few of, that use or enable other people to use other people's work in ways they would not like it being used. From Napster, to emulators, to jailbreaks, to API compatible replacements, DeCSS, any fair-use defense of copyright infringement, community splits of open source projects, DRM stripping tools, CD rippers, tape recorders, even down to the humble search engine. It seems hypocritical for us to suddenly now develop a support for moral rights when the shoe is on the other foot.
Why I dislike AI code? Not because any of this reasons. I dislike bad written code. The overall quality of AI code is shit. Not becuase the AI couldn't do it better, but because the people that are using it are mostly inexperienced morons or people that don't care for any quality at all.
And in the end the software they create ends up on my desk. Not only because it already infested the big players, additionally because now really EVERY simpleton can generate a shitty software and I need to filter out the garbage out of twenty applications that promise to solve the same problem.
I hated Delphi 5 at it's time for the same reason. But now the count of morons that can generate software is bigger.
Edit: The complete process of writing code with AI tools guides you to ignore quality even then when you are not a moron. Leave the last 30% of the solution like it is, although its not the best solution you would have picked, or discuss this with the AI for a time double as long as you needed for the first 70%.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 3.9 ms ] thread"In this situation it isn’t the technology that takes the job, it’s the mode of production. And given that programming is intellectual work, the means of production is literally our heads, we ought to be able to seize those."
The word 'ought' is doing so much heavy lifting here...
The original URL has been dead for over five years, so I don't know why a blog post from yesterday linked to it.
Is it a way to develop critical bits of code, depths of your business logic? Absolutely not. Can it solve a lot of boilerplate and support logic? Absolutely yes.
Seeing "AI Companies as Bad Actors"... can't fully disagree there. There's far too many far too dodgy things about these businesses, and I trust them as far as I can audit them (not very far). And the missing argument's the cognitive decline of using these things to think for us. I try to keep myself sharp by still manually doing a fair amount of things in my life. I refuse to automate _everything_ - especially the stuff I do for fun. Having an LLM manage hobby-adjacent stuff is a quick trip to burnout land, especially once fixing the thing becomes "the hobby"... and it does.
We invented compilers, word processors, templated document generation, code generators, DSLs and things like that which were all labour reduction technologies for describing systems and information. These were net positives for society but wiped out full administrative and technical professions.
The issue is the impact that technology has on society. It should used to free up more time for enriching humanity with art, music, sciences, mathematics etc. But what really happens is they are used entirely for concentrating wealth by taking revenue and reducing employment, leaving functional people unemployed, destitute and in debt to the people who have the wealth concentration.
At this point it's morally objectionable on all grounds.
A second point, which should be considered an addition to the article is that AI coding shapes thinking based on its capabilities, not the user's intent. I see this a lot. If the objective is to do thing X because it aligns with a well-researched strategic analysis, it may not align with that. People are happy to be pushed to do thing Y which is a totally different thing because they are being slowly gaslit into accepting the mediocrity that the model promotes. This leads to poor business outcomes. And all this is hidden and written off because everyone needs to be seen as AI thought leaders at a high level because that's what keeps the stock going up and engineers are being rated on delivery, not on ROI.
Everthing is fucking broken.
which is precisely why this tech has become so invasive in the software industry, the majority's thinking capabilities were mediocre to begin with. Good code was held in place by a few good men and women working as tech leads.
I am also tired of the "We now have bigger picture problems to solve instead". If your code looked like spaghetti, so are your big picture solutions. As a matter of fact, big picture problems are much harder than writing a stupid function.
Demand food, shelter, leisure, purpose. Jobs are one (honestly pretty bad) implementation of that
>> Who's labor are you demanding there
> Nobody's labor is being demanded
If you oppose AI, you basically stop future such progressive ideas from permeating.
Why would you, as a progressive, reject AI if you are interested in progress?
It doesn't really help us improve our code, which wouldn't just be "creating a lot of it really easily", but refactoring existing things. Not just performance, readability, variable and function names and how it's all structured, all the artsy fartsy craftsmanship stuff. Docs that are more readable and more concise. That would be "building" or "development" worth the name.
In other words, the longer we would massage and work on our code with actually beneficial "AI", the better off we would be on the day all models have an outage. Instead of the other way around, and the direction is less expertise, less autonomy, less self-mastery, and also less community, because everybody just makes "their" version of whatever, taking from others instead of collaborating with them.
And all that is on top of the "robbery" that it still is. It's taking what humans made so far, uses it against us, and destroys the "junior pipeline" or however you want to call it. Speaking of, since someone on HN said the comments on https://www.cringely.com/2026/07/16/the-auditors-opinion/ were interesting, I read them, and here's one:
> One of the sadder knock-on effects of the current AI bubble has been how hordes of elderly people are desperately clinging to chatbots as some kind of “miracle cure” that will fulfill all their dreams and fantasies while also saving them from loneliness. I know at least two older people in real life who are suffering from this delusion to some extent.
> The younger people, meanwhile, tend to reject generative AI as “slop” and treat it with the disdain it deserves.
> This is a curious inversion of every other technological breakthrough in human history. In my lifetime, I’ve witnessed the dawn of both personal computers and the Internet, and I’ve seen young people (including myself) get very excited about the possibilities of both. It’s just SO WEIRD to be in the early stages of a new technology that everyone (except old people, evil billionaires, and the usual group of grifters) is kinda meh about.
> I don’t know what that means, but I don’t think it’s a good sign.
But more importantly, sure, we were always paid for results. And yes, sometimes professions transform or die. The buggy whip manufacturers aren't doing that great these days. But people are also allowed to have feelings about losing their professions.
My real concern is that the stated goal of the AI companies is to do this to every human job. They want to replace programmers and artists and movie-makers and—as soon as they get robotics figured out—physical laborers. They measure the ability of their models to run entire retail businesses with Vending Bench, so management isn't safe, either. They sell their AIs to the military for use in weapons. No job is safe, anywhere: They want everything, if they can figure out how to take it.
If the current rate of AI advance stops really soon, then eventually we'll figure out some kind of liveable future. Probably one with fewer programmers. But the labs have zero intention of stopping. Anthropic is a cult, and they hope to build a machine god that will have power over humanity forever. So I'm not going to them for answers. OpenAI used to have non-profit oversight that encouraged them to serve society, and Sam Altman gutted it like a fish. So I don't think I trust them to design a machine that replaces all human jobs, either.
Personally, I don't mind current coding models, at least not the local-sized ones that exist now. They make nice sounding boards and can be trusted with the grunt work. We could adapt to these, given time.
But so far, AI technology shows no sign of stopping. And the labs are focused heavily on coding and math, because the next step in their plan is to let their models do AI research so that they can advance their technology even faster into new fields.
We could, like, decide that we don't need to do this. There is no need to try to replace every single human job with a super human machine. Because if you thought the enshittification of the Internet was bad, wait until you see the enshittification of a machine that can do almost every human job. No thanks.
But if AI can do everything we can do and better, its strange to argue that we still deserve to do that job. Who will pay you and why would they pay you if they can get it done cheaper? Why do you deserve to be paid higher wages when it can be done easily and better by something else?
Sam Altman says a lot of things, most of which seem to benefit Sam Altman. And Google used to tell me that they wouldn't be evil. Facebook probably said some noble-sounding nonsense at some point, too.
> Why do you deserve to be paid higher wages when it can be done easily and better by something else?
I mean, this is exactly what happened to the Neanderthals: We could do every job better than they could, and now there are no more Neanderthals. So I wouldn't like a future where two companies make machines that outcompete humans at every job.
Which is why I say we can adapt to this, but only if it stops advancing soon.
Of all the things that rile me up in this current landscape, the pervasive tone of "why aren't you happy? I'm happy! You should be happy about this" is the most infuriating.
Like, I get the idea, I really do, but is there a need to announce it to the winds so often? Is this a pride thing?
Like, I'd be tempted to write something like this just to crystallise the stance in my own head (i.e. writing is thinking) but if it got voted to the top of the front page, that doesn't mean I suddenly meant it as a world-bending thesis.
1. I think most of us know the same thing is occurred when first compile came into the market (Most of them hated it saying 'High Quality ASM code would be only generated by humans' . Moving forward asm hasn't dead but we are only using it only at critically. I think we will do same with LLMs we use what useful and Move forward.
2. Life's isn't just always staying in front of a box and writing some code. If AI does the job of creating useful code with quality i would be more than happy since i could get start to work on more abstract things like Arts and Humanity. which for our growth is essential as you can see the current society is currently disdain.
Finally to conclude don't try to interrupt the flow just accept it and move forward.
Life is SHORT
2. Good for you and i wont criticize this take. My life is A LOT about sitting in front of a computer writing useful and/or fun code though and i love it!
Code is code.
Code can be art, code can also be simply a tool to reach a goal.
If you want to create art, do it with your own two hands and your brain.
If you want to just Do The Thing, codegen it. No one cares. In before "Except your users having to use your vibeslop" FYI your Hand-Crafted Artisanal Code will still have bugs, so it's a moot point.
Heck, the very first thing the author does is links to another one of his own blog post where the above points are explicitly stated and explained, then restates at the end of the paragraph that there are no valid arguments for this one. So why keep beating this dead horse? Especially as the opener of the article.
This kind of mindset baffles me.
[1]https://www.makonea.com/en-US/casual/the-hardest-part-of-usi...
> being able to understand code by reading it is different from being able to do that same modeling yourself starting from a blank screen
That is simply Domain Knowledge. In a specific context, be it a Framework or an App or a Platform or Infrastructure or whatever else, you have to understand it. Of course, if you start from zero and you build it from scratch yourself, you have pretty much the best DK you can have.
That is usually not the case though. If you have external collaborators of any kind, your DK is always challenged. I find myself often dumped into Domains from which I have to gather Knowledge to understand. And, for me personally, having to read code written by an AI, especially now that they've gotten smart enough to not make glaringly stupid errors, is MUCH better than having to read Hand Crafted Code that has been handslopped (yes, I'm going to coin that term now) to meet Deadlines. Shortcuts, hacks, you name it. Terrible codebase sins, accumulated as years, even DECADES of "we'll fix it later".
Of course it's a pain. It always has been. Back in the GPT 4 / Claude 4 days, AI generated code was atrocious, but that is not the case anymore.
The rest of the article, especially these bolded points:
> The weight shifts from the ability to produce directly to the ability to evaluate output and set direction.
> So in the AI era, productivity is increasingly limited by the speed of judgment rather than the speed of writing.
> A manager who steps away from the front line may, over time, lose the ability to perform the work they are managing.
> does being able to evaluate code mean the same thing as owning the mental model of that program?
Are SPOT ON. You can vibeslop anything at the speed of light. But if you don't have the knowledge, taste, and expertise to not lose track of your DK so that it doesn't become an unmanageable mess, it's going to bite you in the proverbial ass.
But, again, that has always been true!
How is the code that was vibeslopped by ChatGPT in 1 minute different from the Junior Dev who spent a week handslopping a new type of wheel? The only difference is quality and speed.
And you need expertise to be able to recognize when something is wrong, and keep your DK updated at scale.
do what you will. CNCs did not remove need for artisans.
Sure, but with LLMs you get a bad result with more bugs and greater fragility. People will care about that even if they don't care per se about the craft.
is spiritually untrue. as cnc grew, machinists shrunk in headcount and wage.
it's like claming that online shopping hasn't killed malls. malls do still exist, but when is the last time you've been to one? was it busy?
> It can be used to produce art, but it's not art itself.
one can argue that the actual art in the Demoscene is the things the code makes visible/audible, not the code itself.
it's like saying an empty piece of paper and a pen are art instead of the drawing which was made by using those things as tools.
there is an angle of a modern art installation featuring just a pen and an empty piece of paper, but that feels like an exception confirming the rule.
For example, is .kkrieger demo? Is it art?
Kind of subjective really.
[1]: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for...
i'd immediately agree for code which looks like art by looking at it, so in cases where the code really is the art. i can also imagine that there's code which looks like art and "generates" it as well, so that seems like code as an artwork.
for cases where code was written/engineered well to create an artwork with the least amount of lines, i'd consider the generated artwork to be art, and the code the result of a competitive coding challenge. again, subjective.
when comparing it to other forms of art i'm not that sure. i've mentioned performance art, which feels a bit like the exception breaking the rule. there's conceptual art as well. is the act of painting art itself? is a photographer finding the optimal place to stand to take a picture art? almost starts to sound like an artwork vs. artform discussion.
https://c50.fingswotidun.com/show/?code=13%2Fz23%2F-~%2Flxyt...
Anything can be art.
Art? While me and my colleagues had their own little style differences, I wouldn't call it art.
We talk a lot about the consumer side of this. Consumers will get tired of the creative output of AI. That it lacks soul. I agree.
But there is also the artist’s side. A craft that you dedicate decades to that’s now indistinguishable from someone who typed a couple sentences. This is a demoralizing place to be.
Me - an avid vibe coder (with 20 years of software development experience). Opinion - this is next evolution. It will not go away. It bumped productivity 6x. Engineering does not go anywhere. SDLC is still a thing. Its just that C-suite can actively participate in development. Everything happens faster. We deliver more features.
Art is gone. Passion is gone. Its all just "work". I used to sit in a friday evening with a bottle(s) of beer and "develop for fun". write code, read new stuff.
Now it feels more like steering a ship. there are some guys throwing coal in the engine. I dont know them in face, but the ship goes forward, thats the main thing.
M.Twain "The report of my death was an exaggeration."
It all boils down to this really. How you get there is kind of irrelevant, unless it isn't because of privacy and copyright concerns and such.
It's still the case that fewer people are required so I'm not sure this argument holds up. In the UK at least, entry-level software engineer roles down roughly 27% year-on-year after gpt was launched according to one article I saw.
I don't agree with this article but equally I respect their opinion. My primary reason I use AI is that a lot of coding is boring and has often made me wonder what I am doing with my life. At least now I am able to focus more on the parts of software development that interest me, shifting more of my time to the left of the development lifecycle: innovation and design
I believe that AI companies (much like any other company) are primarily driven by financial motivations (note that this might not extend to the individual people working there). Now often this manifests in ways that serve humans or even humanity, but other times it doesn't. This isn't unique to AI companies, and if you tried to only support companies that put humanity over finances, you'd be hard pressed to find many.
> Motivated by Bertrand Meyer’s AI for Smarties, if you believe that software engineering is the careful application of the mysterious knowledge of software engineers, encapsulated in rules like the SOLID principles, “prefer composition over inheritance”, “use you’re type’s good“, the Law of Demeter and so on, then AI can’t possibly write software because it doesn’t apply those rules, it just generates text that happens to compile.
... is this the "LLMs don't truly understand what they are saying" of software engineering? I'd also say there is a case for re-evaluating some of the established engineering principles, considering that they were built on assumptions that are no longer true.
I never understand why nobody here thinks of stuff like this.
The best I could figure is that I like to start with requirements, use AI to discuss and settle on its high level design and specific aspects of its implementation. I may or may not read all the code, but the key thing is even if I didn't read the code in advance, doing so would not be a surprise and I'd know what it was doing and how it was doing it because those were things I decided during the up-front conversations and not left as an open exercise for the AI. And coming back to the codeberg.org vote I can guess that it was elements like these that they wanted to guard. They don't want repos whose owners don't know what the code does in a technical sense or how it's constructed etc. There's likely other things too like seeing text that doesn't read like people wrote it and I find that tiring to read (in a literal way, I get drained from reading too much of it) and endorse minimizing that.
Another thought was that my ever long search for better and better programming languages was that if I have a clear vision of what I want the language should have the least friction to write it down. Some languages that feel closer than others were Elm, Elixir, F#/OCaml, Pony, Rust, Kotlin, Go. Only a couple of these are my languages I'd regularly used but would prefer to have my AIs write in them. For web I'd probably also accept Vue, Svelte, or (simple) React. In particular using Go for mini back-ends is particularly effective as the coding style tends to be regular and boring which minimizes differences between human and machine written styles. So in a sense giving specs at multiple levels of abstraction and detail is the perfect high level language I'd been wanting.
Anyway, it's cute that the author writes as if AI companies are only automating the "typing code" part and not the "delivering valuable software" part. They will automate everything that they can. Whatever special understanding or ability you think you have that the machine lacks, if it leads you to any amount of success, will be hoovered up into the machine for easy replication by anyone. That's why there's so much money in this - people aren't investing trillions just so that you can type less/no code.
* There are valid defenses for using work against the author's wishes - e.g., a racist shouldn't be able to stop people of other races from viewing their work. I just think these particular defenses are shit.
I think any argument like this has to contend with the fact that our entire industry is rife with projects we almost all support at least a few of, that use or enable other people to use other people's work in ways they would not like it being used. From Napster, to emulators, to jailbreaks, to API compatible replacements, DeCSS, any fair-use defense of copyright infringement, community splits of open source projects, DRM stripping tools, CD rippers, tape recorders, even down to the humble search engine. It seems hypocritical for us to suddenly now develop a support for moral rights when the shoe is on the other foot.
Why I dislike AI code? Not because any of this reasons. I dislike bad written code. The overall quality of AI code is shit. Not becuase the AI couldn't do it better, but because the people that are using it are mostly inexperienced morons or people that don't care for any quality at all. And in the end the software they create ends up on my desk. Not only because it already infested the big players, additionally because now really EVERY simpleton can generate a shitty software and I need to filter out the garbage out of twenty applications that promise to solve the same problem.
I hated Delphi 5 at it's time for the same reason. But now the count of morons that can generate software is bigger.
Edit: The complete process of writing code with AI tools guides you to ignore quality even then when you are not a moron. Leave the last 30% of the solution like it is, although its not the best solution you would have picked, or discuss this with the AI for a time double as long as you needed for the first 70%.