Being anti "AI" has nothing to do with being progressive. Historically, hackers have always rejected bloated tools, especially those that are not under their control and that spy on them and build dossiers like ChatGPT.

Hackers have historically derided any website generators or tools like ColdFusion[tm] or VisualStudio[tm] for that matter.

It is relatively new that some corporate owned "open" source developers use things like VSCode and have no issues with all their actions being tracked and surveilled by their corporate masters.

Please do no co-opt the term "hacker".

> That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture.

People who haven't lived through the transition will likely come here to tell you how wrong you are, but you are 100% correct.

I think LLMs are net helpful if used well, but there's also a big problem with them in workplaces that needs to be called out.

It's really easy to use LLMs to shift work onto other people. If all your coworkers use LLMs and you don't you're gonna get eaten alive. LLMs are unreasonably effective at generating large volumes of stuff that resembles diligent work on the surface.

The other thing is, tools change trade-offs. If you're in a team that's decided to lean into static analysis, and you don't use type checking in your editor, you're getting all the costs and less of the benefits. Or if you're in a team that's decided to go dynamic, writing good types for just your module is mostly a waste of time.

LLMs are like this too. If you're using a very different workflow from everyone else on your team, you're going to end up constantly arguing for different trade-offs, and ultimately you're going to cause a bunch of pointless friction. If you don't want to work the same way as the rest of the team just join a different team, it's really better for everyone.

This just happened to me this week.

I work on the platform everyone builds on top of. A change here can subtlety break any feature, no matter how distant.

AI just can't cope with this yet. So my team has been told that we are too slow.

Meanwhile, earlier this week we halted a roll out because if a bug introduced by AI, as it worked around a privacy feature by just allow listing the behavior it wanted, instead of changing the code to address to policy. It wasn't caught in review because the file that was changed didn't require my teams review (because we ship more slowly, they removed us as code owners for many files recently).

> Non-coders are churning out small apps in record pace, juniors are looking like savants with the amount of code and tasks they finish, where probably 90% of the code is done by Claude or whatever.

Honestly I think you’re swallowing some of the hype here.

I think the biggest advantages of LLMs go to the experienced coders who know how to leverage them in their workflows. That may not even include having the LLM write the code directly.

The non-coders producing apps meme is all over social media, but the real world results aren’t there. All over Twitter there were “build in public” indie non-tech developers using LLMs to write their apps and the hype didn’t match reality. Some people could get minimal apps out the door that kind of talked to a back end, but even those people were running into issues not breaking everything on update or managing software lifecycle.

The top complaint in all of the social circles I have about LLMs is with juniors submitting LLM junk PRs and then blaming the LLM. It’s just not true that juniors are expertly solving tasks with LLMs faster than seniors.

I think LLMs are helpful and anyone senior isn’t learning how to use them to their advantage (which doesn’t mean telling the LLM what to write and hoping for the best) is missing out. I think people swallowing the hype about non-tech people and juniors doing senior work is getting misled about the actual ways to use these tools effectively.

The era of software mass production has begun. With many "devs" just being workers in a production line, pushing buttons, repeating the same task over and over.

The produced products however do not compare in quality to other industry's mass production lines. I wonder how long it takes until this comes all crashing down. Software mostly already is not a high quality product.. with Claude & co it just gets worse.

edit: sentence fixed.

> If your org is blindly data/metric driven

Are there for profit companies (not non profits, research institutes etc…) that are not metric driven?

> You really need a competent and understanding boss to not be labeled a luddite, because let's be real - LLMs have made everyone more "productive" on paper.

I am actually less productive when using LLMs because now I have to read another entities code and be able to judge wether this fits my current business problem or not. If it doesn't, yay refactoring prompts instead of tackling the actual problem. Also I can write code for free, LLMs coding assistants aren't free. I can fit business problems amd edge cases into my brain given some time, a LLM is unaware about edge cases, legal requirements, decoupled dependencies, potential refactors or the occasional call of boss asking for something to be sneaked into the code right now. If my job forced me to use these tools, congrats, I'll update my address to some hut in a forrest eating cold canned ravioli for the rest of my life because I for sure dont wanna work in a world where I am forced to use dystopian big tech machines I cant look into.

The "devaluation" they mention is just the correction against the absurd ZIRP bump, that lured would-be doctors and lawyers into tech jobs at FAANG and FAANG-alike firms with the promise of upper middle class lifestyles for trivially weaving together API calls and jockeying JIRA tickets. You didn't have to spend years more in grad school, you didn't have to be a diligent engineer. You just had to had to have a knack for standardized tests (Leetcode) and the time to grid some prep.

The compensation and hiring for that kind of inexpert work were completely out of sync with anything sustainable but held up for almost a decade because money was cheap. Now, money is held much more tightly and we stumbled into a tech that can cheaply regurgitate a lot of so the trivial inexpert work, meaning the bottom fell out of these untenable, overpaid jobs.

You and I may not be effected, having charted a different path through the industry and built some kind of professional career foundation, but these kids who were (irresponsibly) promised an easy upper middle class life are still real people with real life plans, who are now finding themselves in a deeply disappointing and disorienting situation. They didn't believe the correction would come, let alone so suddenly, and now they don't know how they're supposed to get themselves back on track for the luxury lifestyle they thought they legitimately earned.

You sound exactly like that turkey from Nassim Taleb's books that came to the conclusion that the purpose of human beings is to make turkeys very happy with lots of food and breeding opportunities. And the turkey's thesis gets validated perfectly every day he wakes up to a delicious fatty meal.

Until Thanksgiving.

> What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession

You're probably fine as a more senior dev...for now.

But if I was a junior I'd be very worried about the longevity I can expect as a dev. It's already easier for many/most cases to assign work to a LLM vs handholding a human through it.

Plus as an industry we've been exploiting our employer's lack of information to extract large salaries to produce largely poor quality outputs imo. And as that ignorance moat gets smaller, this becomes harder to pull off.

> And now, we're having a huge explosion of tools for developers, to build software that has to be maintained by developers, made by developers for developers.

What do you think they're building all those datacenters for? Why do you think so much money is pouring into AI companies?

It's not to help make developers more efficient with code assistants.

Traditional computation will be replaced with bots in every aspect of software. The goal is to devalue our labor and replace it with computation performed by machines owned by the wealthy, who can lease this out.

If you can't see this coming you lack both imagination and historical perspective.

Five years ago Claude Code would have been essentially unimaginable. Consider this.

So sure, enjoy your job churning out buggy whips while you can, but you better have a plan B for when the automobiles truly arrive.

> programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks if you have a proper setup and relatively easy to find a new job when you need it

Not in where I live though. Competition is fierce, both in industry and academia, for most posts being saturated and most employees face "HR optimization" in their late 30s. Not to mention working over time, and its physical consequences.

> What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession that seems to be continuously growing

A lot of newly skilled job applicants can't find anything in the job market right now.

100% my experience as well.

Negativity spreads so much more quickly than positivity online, and I feel as though too many people live in self reinforcing negative comment sections and blog posts than in the real world, which gives them a distorted view.

My opinion is that LLMs are doing nothing but accelerating what's possible with the craft, not eliminating it. If anything, this makes a single developer MORE valuable, because they can now do more with less.

The job of a programmer is, and has always been, 50% making our job obsolete (through various forms of automation) and 50% ensuring our job security (through various forms of abstraction).

> I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun)

In my Big Tech job, I sometimes forget that some people can really enjoy what they do. It seems like you're in a fortunate position of both high pay and high enjoyment. Congratulations! Out of curiosity, what do you work on?

It's absolutely not easy to find a new job in France, and more generally in Europe

> programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks...

I don't know what kind of work you do but this depends a lot on what kind of projects you work on

Software to date has been a [Jevons good](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox). Demand for software has been constrained by the cost efficiency and risk of software projects. Productivity improvements in software engineering have resulted in higher demand for software, not less, because each improvement in productivity unblocks more of the backlog of projects that weren't cost effective before.

There's no law of nature that says this has to continue forever, but it's a trend that's been with us since the birth of the industry. You don't need to look at AI tools or methodoligies or whatever. We have code reuse! Productivity has obviously improved, it's just that there's also an arms race between software products in UI complexity, features, etc.

If you don't keep improving how efficiently you can ship value, your work will indeed be devalued. It could be that the economics shift such that pretty much all programming work gets paid less, it could be that if you're good and diligent you do even better than before. I don't know.

What I do know is that whichever way the economics shake out, it's morally neutral. It sounds like the author of this post leans into a labor theory of value, and if you buy into that, well...You end up with some pretty confused and contradictory ideas. They position software as a "craft" that's valuable in itself. It's nonsense. People have shit to do and things they want. It's up to us to make ourselves useful. This isn't performance art.

I didn't enter this profession because I love reviewing code though.

I came here to quote the same quote but with the opposite sentiment. If you look at the history of work, at least in the states, it’s a history of almost continual devaluation and automation. I’ve been assuming that my generation, entering the profession in the 2010s, will be the last where it’s a pathway to an upper middle class life. Just like the factory workers before us automation will come for those who do mostly repetitive tasks. Sure there will be well paid professional software devs in the future just as there are some well paid factory workers who mostly maintain machines. But the scale of the opportunity will be much smaller.

What is devalued is traditional labor-based ideology. The blog references Marx's theory of alienation. The Marxist labor theory of value, that the value of anything is determined by the labor that creates it, gives the working class moral authority over the owner class. When labor is reduced, the basis of socialist revolution is devalued, as the working class no longer can claim superior contributions to value creation.

If one doesn't subscribe to traditional Marxist ideology, this argument won't land the same way, but elements of these ideas have made their way into popular ideas of value.

> What exactly is being de-valuated We are being second guessed by any sub organism with little brain, but opposable thumbs, at a rate much greater than before, because now the sub organism can simply ask the LLM to type their arguments for them. How many times have you received screenshots of an LLM output yesanding whatever bizarre request you already tried to explain and dismiss as not possible/feasible/unnecessary? the sub organism has delegated their thoughts to the LLM and i always find that extremely infuriating, because all i want to do is to shake that organism and cry "why don't you get it? think! THINK! THINK FOR YOURSELF FOR JUST A SECOND"

Also, i enjoy programming. Even typing boring shit as boilerplate because i keep my brain engaged. As much as i type i keep thinking, is this really necessary? and maybe figure out something leaner. LLMs want to deprive me of enjoyment of my work (research, learn) and of my brain. No thanks, no LLM for me. And i don't care whatever garbage it outputs, i'd much prefere if the garbage was your output, or you are useless.

The only use i have for LLMs and diffusion models is to entertain myself with stupid bullshit i come up with that i would find funny. I massively enjoy projects such as https://dumbassideas.com/

Note: Not taking into account the "classic" ML uses, my rant only going to LLMs and the LLM craze. A tool made by grifters, for grifters.

> I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun), and programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy

Eh?

I'm happy for you (and envious), because that is not my experience. The job is hard. Agile's constant fortnightly deadlines, a complete lack of respect by the rest of the stakeholders for the work developers do (even more so now because "ai can do that"), changing requirements but an expectation to welcome changing requirements because that is agile, incredibly egotistical assholes that seem to gravitate to engineering manager roles, and a job market that's been dead for a few years now.

No doubt some will comment and say that if I think my job is hard I should compare it to a coal miner in the 1940's. True, but as Neil Young sang: "Though my problems are meaningless, that don't make them go away."

> the US seems to struggle with that specific point as of late, yet it remains true in the rest of the world

Are you sure about that?

>the job is easy

software engineering is easy? you live in bubble, try teaching programming to someone new to it and you'll realize how muuuuch effort it requires

> What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun)

You do realise your position of luck is not normal, right? This is not how your average Techie 2025 is.

Your complete lack of empathy is going to be your undoing. Might want to check in on that.

There’s been over 1 million people laid off in tech in the past 4 years

https://www.trueup.io/layoffs

> What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"?

I'm not paid enough to clean up shit after an AI. Behind an intern or junior? Sure, I enjoy that because I can tell them how shit works, where they went off the rails, and I can be sure they will not repeat that mistake and be better programmers afterwards.

But an AI? Oh good luck with that and good luck dealing with the "updates" that get forced upon you. Fuck all of that, I'm out.

You clearly haven't tried looking for a job in the last two years have you

Are we living on the same planet?

I'd love to live on the same planet you do.

> So I guess my advice is: if you're starting out in this business worry less about LLMs replacing you and more about how to efficiently use that global expert on everything that is sitting on your shoulder.

There's a real danger in that they use so many resources though. Both in the physical world (electricity, raw materials, water etc.) as well as in a financial sense.

All the money spent on AI will not go to your other promising idea. There's a real opportunity cost there. I can't imagine that, at this point, good ideas go without funding because they're not AI.

If you are a software engineere, you can leverage AI a lot better to write code than anyone else.

The complexity of good code, is still complicated.

which means 1. if software development is really solved, everyone else also gets a huge problem (ceo, cto, accountants, designers, etc. etc.) so we are in the back of the ai doomsday line.

And 2. it allows YOU to leverage AI a lot better which can enable you to create your own product.

In my startup, we leverage AI and we are not worried that another company just does the same thing because even if they do, we know how to write good code and architecture and we are also using AI. So we will always be ahead.

Sounds like Manna control system: https://marshallbrain.com/manna

Now apply that thinking to computers. Or levers.

I've seen the argument that computers let us prop up and even scale governmental systems that would have long since collapsed under their own weight if they’d remained manual more than once. I'm not sure I buy it, but computation undoubtedly shapes society.

The author does seem quite keen on computers, but they've been "getting rid of the free-willed human in the loop" for decades. I think there might be some unexamined bias here.

I'm not even saying the core argument's wrong, exactly - clearly, tools build systems ("...and systems kill" - Crass). I guess I'm saying tools are value neutral. Guns don't kill people. So this argument against LLMs is an argument against all tools, unless you can explain how LLMs are a unique category of tool?

(Aside: calling out the lever sounds silly, but I think it's actually a great example. You can't do monumental architecture without levers, and the point in history where we start doing that is also the point where serious surplus extraction kicks in. I don't think that's coincidence).

How is that different from making manual computation obsolete with the help of excel?

Lmao Cory Doctorow. Desperately trying to coin another catchphrase again.

I am surprised (and also kind of not) to see this kind of tech hate on HN of all places.

Would you prefer we heat our homes by burning wood, carry water from the nearby spring, and ride horses to visit relatives?

Progress is progress, and has always changed things. Its funny that apparently, "progressive" left-leaning people are actually so conservative at the core.

So far, in my book, the advancements in the last 100 or even more years have mostly always brought us things I wouldn't want to miss these days. But maybe some people would be happier to go back to the dark ages...

> Hackers have always tried out new technologies to see how they work – or break – so why would LLMs be any different?

Who says we haven't tried it out?

Doesn't Python weaken your thinking about how computers actually work?

Don't be the person refusing the 4GL/Segway/3D TV/NFT/Metaverse. Regularly give the new tool a chance and check if improvements are useful for specific tasks.

Like, I mean, at a certain point it runs out of chances. If someone can show me compelling quantitive evidence that these things are broadly useful I may reconsider, but until then I see no particular reason to do my own sampling. If and when they are useful, there will be _evidence_ of that.

(In fairness Segways seem to have a weird afterlife in certain cities helping to make tourists more annoying; there are sometimes niche uses for even the most pointless tech fads.)

The biggest change in my career was when I got promoted to be a linux sysadmin at a large tech company that was moving to AWS. It was my first sysadmin job and I barely knew what I was doing, but I knew some bash and python. I had a chance to learn how to manage stuff in data centers by logging into servers with ssh and running perl scripts, or I could learn cloudformation because that was what management wanted. Everybody else on my team thought AWS was a fad and refused to touch it, unless absolutely forced to. I wrote a ton of terrible cloudformation and chef cookbooks and got promoted twice times and my salary went from $50,000 a year to $150,000 a year in 3 years after I took a job elsewhere. AFAIK, most of the people on that team got laid off when that whole team was eliminated a few years after I left.

If a calculator gives me 5 when I do 2+2, I throw it away.

If a PC crashes when I uses more than 20% of its soldered memory, i throw it away.

If a mobile phone refuses to connect to a cellular tower, I get another one.

What I want from my tools is reliability. Which is a spectrum, but LLMs are very much on the lower end.

You're preaching to the wrong crowd I guess. Many people here think in extremes.

I was once in your camp, thinking there was some sort of middle-ground to be had with the emergence of Generative AI and it's potential as a useful tool to help me do more work in less time, but I suppose the folks who opposed automated industrial machinery back in the day did the same.

The problem is that, historically speaking, you have two choices;

1. Resist as long as you can, risking being labeled a Luddite or whatever.

2. Acquiesce.

Choice 1 is fraught with difficulty, like a dinosaur struggling to breathe as an asteroid came and changed the atmosphere it had developed lungs to use. Choice 2 is a relinquishment of agency, handing over control of the future to the ones pulling the levers on the machine. I suppose there is a rare Choice 3 that only the elite few are able to pick, which is to accelerate the change.

My increased cynicism about technology was not something that I started out with. Growing up as a teen in the late-80's/early-90's, computers were hotly debated as being either a fad that would die out in a few years or something that was going to revolutionize the way we worked and give us more free time to enjoy life. That never happened, obviously. Sure, we get more work done in less time, but most of us still work until we are too broken to continue and we didn't really gain anything by acquiescing. We could have lived just fine without smartphones or laptops (we did, I remember) and all the invasive things that brought with it such as surveillance, brain-hacking advertising and dopamine burnout. The massive structures that came out of all the money and genius that went into our tech became megacorporations that people like William Gibson and others warned us of, exerting a level of control over us that turned us all into batteries for their toys, discarded and replaced as we are used up. It's a little frightening to me, knowing how hyperbolic that used to sound 30 years ago, and yet, here we stand.

Generative AI threatens so much more than just altering the way we work, though. In some cases, its use in tasks might even be welcomed. I've played with Claude Code, every generative model that Poe.com has access to, DeepSeek, ChatGPT, etc...they're all quite fascinating, especially when viewed as I view them; a dark mirror reflecting our own vastly misunderstood minds back to us. But it's a weird place to be in when you start seeing them replace musicians, artists, writers...all things that humanity has developed over many thousands of years as forms of existential expression, individuality, and humanness because there is no question that we feel quite alone in our experience of consciousness. Perhaps that is why we are trying to build a companion.

To me, the dangers are far too clear and present to take any sort of moderate position, which is why I decided to stop participating in its proliferation. We risk losing something that makes us us by handing off our creativity and thinking to this thing that has no cognizance or comprehension of its own existence. We are not ready for AI, and AI is not ready for us, but as the Accelerationists and Broligarchs continue to inject it into literally every bit of tech they can, we have to make a choice; resist or capitulate.

At my age, I'm a bit tired of capitulating, because it seems every time we hand the reigns over to someone who says they know what they are doing, they fuck it up royally for the rest of us.

I think when the author says

> “We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft”

my interpretation of what the author means by devaluation is the general trend that we’re seeing in LLMs

The theory that I hear from investors is as LLMs generally improve, there will exist a day where a LLMs default code output, coupled with continued hardware speeds, will become _good enough_ for the majority of companies - even if the code looks like crap and is 100x slower than it needs to be

This doesn’t mean there won’t be a few companies that still need SWEs to drop down and do engineering, but tbh, the majority of companies today just need a basic web app - and we’ve commoditized web app dev tools to oblivion. I’d even go as far to argue that what most programmers do today isn’t engineering, it’s gluing together an ecosystem of tooling and or API’s.

Real engineering seems to happen outside of work on open source projects, at the mav 7 on specialized teams, or at niche deeply technical startups

EDIT: I’m not saying this is good or bad, but I’m just making the observation that there is a trend towards devaluing this work in the economy for the majority of people, and I generally empathize with people who just want stability and to raise a family within reasonable means

I really love LLMs for Rust. Before them I was an intermediate Rust dev, and only used it in specific circumstances where the extra coding overhead paid off.

Now I write just about everything in Rust because why not? If I can vibe code Rust about as fast as Python, why would I ever use Python outside of ML?

> I have no critical knowledge about the codebase that makes me feel like I could fix an edge case without reading the source code line by line (which at that point would probably take longer than 4 hours).

Peter Naur argues that programming is fundamentally an activity of theory building, not just program text production. The code itself is merely the artifact of the real work.

You must not confuse the artifact (the source code) with the mind that produced the artifact. The theory is not contained in the text output of the theory-making process.

The problems of program modification arise from acting on the assumption that programming is just text production; the decay of a program is a result of modifications made by programmers without a proper grasp of the underlying theory. LLMs cannot obtain Naur's Ryleian "theory" because they "ingest the output of work" rather than developing the theory by doing the work.

LLMs may _appear_ to have a theory about a program, but this is an illusion.

To believe that LLMs can write software, one must mistakenly assume that the main activity of the programmer is simply to produce source code, which is (according to Naur) inaccurate.

The thing about reading code and understanding is logical reasoning, which you can do by knowing the semantic of each tokens. But the semantics are not universal. You have the Turing Machine, the lambda calculus, horn clauses, etc… Then there are more abstractions (and new semantics) built on top of those.

Writing code is very easy if you know the solution and the semantics of the coding platform. But knowing the solution is a difficult task, even in a business settings where the difficulty are more communication issues. Knowing the semantics of the coding platform is also a difficult one, because you’ll probably be using others’ code and you’ll face the same communication issue (lack of documentation, erroneous documentation, etc…)

So being good at programming does not really means knowing code. It’s more about knowing how to bypass communication barriers to get the knowledge you need.

> What's yourself without your material possessions and social connections? There is no such thing as yourself without these.

perhaps a being that has the capacity for intention and will?

Harsh but fair. In short, some people are upset about change happening to them. They think it's unfair and that they deserve better. Maybe that's true. But unfair things happen to lots of people all the time. And ultimately people move on, mostly. There's a futility to being very emotional about it.

I don't get all the whining of people about having to adapt. That's a constant in our industry and always has been. If what you were doing was so easy that it fell victim to the first generation of AI tools that are doing a decent enough job of it, then maybe what you were doing was a bit Ground Hog day to begin with. I've certainly been involved with a lot of projects where a lot of the work felt that way. Customer wants a web app thing with a log in flow and a this and a that. 99% of that stuff is kind of very predictable. That's why agentic coding tools are so good at this stuff. But lets be honest, it was kind of low value stuff to begin with. And it's nice that people over-payed for that for a while but it was never going to be forever.

There's still plenty of stuff these tools are less good at. It gets progressively harder if you are integrating lots of different niche things or doing some non standard/non trivial things. And even those things where it does a decent job, it still requires good judgment and expertise to 1) be able to even ask for the right thing and then 2) judge if what comes back is fit for purpose.

There's plenty of work out there supporting companies with decades of legacy software that are not going to be throwing away everything they have overnight. Leveling up their UIs with AI powered features, cross integrating a lot of stuff, etc. is going to generate lots of work and business. And most companies are very poorly equipped to do that in house even if they have access to agentic coding tools.

For me AI is actually generating more work, not less. I'm now taking on bigger things that were previously impossible to take on without involving more people. I have about 10x more things I want to do than I have bandwidth for. I have to take decisions about doing things the stupid old way because it's better/faster or attempting to generate some code. All new tools do is accelerate the pace and raise the ambition levels. That too is nothing new in our industry. Things that were hard are now easy, so we do more of them and find yet harder things to do next. We're not about to run out of hard things to do any time soon.

Adapting is hard. Not everyone will manage. Some people might burn out doing that or change career. And some people are in denial or angry about that. And you can't really expect others to loose a lot of sleep over this. Whether that's unfair or not doesn't really matter.

> I _need_ to feel comfortable _right now_. It doesn't matter what I do to the world so long as I'm comfortable _right now._

I think that can be offset if you have a strong motivation, a clear goal to look forward to in a reasonable amount of time, to help you endure through the discomfort:

Before I had enough financial independence to be able to travel at will, I was often stuck in a shit ass city, where the most fun to be had was video games and fantasizing about my next vacation coming up in a month or 2, and that helped me a lot in coping with my circumstances.

Too few people are allowed or can afford even this luxury of a pleasant future, a promise of a life different/better than their current.

> People broadly are short term thinkers.

I wonder how much of that is "nature vs. nurture"?

Like the Tolkienesque elves in fantasy worlds, would humans be more chill too if our natural lifespans were counted in centuries instead of decades?

Or is it the pace of society, our civilization, that always keeps us on edge?

I mean I'm not sure if we're born with a biological sense of mortality, an hourglass of doom encoded into our genes..

What if everybody had 4 days of work per week, guaranteed vacation time every few months, kids didn't have to wake up at 7/8 in the morning every day, and progress was measured biennially, e.g. 2 years between school grades/exams, and economic performance was also reviewed in 2 year periods, and so on, could we as a species mellow the fuck out?

The problem is the AI excavator destroying the road because it hallucinated the ditch.

> Implying being a hacker has some correlation with being progressive

I didn't read it that way. "Progressive hacker circles" doesn't imply that all hackers are progressive, it can just be distinguishing progressive circles from conservative ones.

> Implying being a hacker has some correlation with being progressive

I mean, yeah, that kind of checks out. The quoted part doesn't make much sense to me, but that most hackers are progressives (as in "enact progress by change", not the twisted American version) should hardly come as a surprise. The opposite would be that a hacker could be a conservative (again, not the US version, but the global definition; "reluctant to change"), which is pretty much a oxymoron. Best would be to eschew political/ideological labels in total, and just say we hackers are unpolitical :)

Pro/regressive are terms that are highly contextual. Progress for progress’ sake alone can move anything forward. I would argue the progression of the attention economy has been extremely negative for most of the human race, yet that is “progressing.”

The typical CCC / Hackerspace - circle is kinda progressive / left leaning. At least in my experience. Which I think she(or he?) was implying. Of course not every hacker is :)

I was embarrassed recently to realize that almost all the code I create these days is written by AIs. Then I realized that’s OK. It’s a tool, and I’m making effective use of it. My job was to solve problems, not to write code.

I have a little pet theory brewing. Corporate work claims that we hire junior devs who become intermediate devs, who then become senior devs. The doomsday crowd claim that AI has replaced junior and intermediate devs, and is coming for the senior devs next.

This has felt off to me because I do way more than just code. Business users don’t want get into the details of building software. They want a guy like me to handle that.

I know how to talk to non-technical SMEs and extract their real requirements. I understand how to translate this into architecture decisions that align with the broader org. I know how to map it into a plan that meets those org objectives. And so on.

I think that really what happens is nerds exist and through osmosis a few of them become senior developers. They in turn have junior and intermediate assistant developers to help them deliver. Sometimes those assistants turn out to be nerds themselves, and they spontaneously transmute into senior developers!

AI is replacing those assistant human developers, but we will still need the senior developers because most business people want to sit with a real human being to solve their problem.

I will, however, get worried when AIs start running businesses. Then we are in trouble.

? Maybe Im missing something, but tech is controlled by a handful of companies - always have been

I guess it depends on what you define as "tech", but the '80s, '90s, and early '00s had an explosion of tiny hardware and software startups. Some even threatened Intel with x86 clones.

It wasn't until the late '90s that NVIDIA was the clear GPU winner, for instance. It had serious competition from 3DFX, ATI, and a bunch of other smaller companies.

> Maybe Im missing something, but tech is controlled by a handful of companies - always have been;

The entire open source movement would like a word with you.

You are not missing much. Yes there will be situations where AI won’t be helpful, but that’s not a majority

Used right, Claude Code is actually very impressive. You just have to already be a programmer to use it right - divide the problem into small chunks yourself, instruct it to work on the small chunks.

Second example - there is a certain expectation of language in American professional communication. As a non native speaker I can tell you that not following that expectation has real impact on a career. AI has been transformational, writing an email myself and asking it to ‘make this into American professional english’

> What am I missing?

The youthful desire to rage against the machine?

There's a lot of overlap between "AI is evil megacapitalism" and "AI is ineffective", and I never understood the latter, but I am increasingly arriving to the understanding that the latter claim isn't real, it's just a soldier in the war being fought over the former.

Not much. Even the argument that AI is another tool to strip people of power is not that great.

It's possible to use AI chatbots against the system of power, to help detect and point out manipulation, or lack of nuance in arguments, or political texts. To help decipher legalese in contracts, or point out problematic passages in terms of use. To help with interactions with the sate, even non-trivial ones like FOI requests, or disputing information disclosure rejections, etc.

AI tools can be used to help against the systems of power.

Exactly.

Reading the blog post the Marxist sentiment was creeping in, and then I also saw actual Marx referenced in the footnotes.