From my point of view, many programmers hate Gen AI because they feel like they've lost a lot of power. With LLMs advancing, they go from kings of the company to normal employees. This is not unlike many industries where some technology or machine automates much of what they do and they resist.

For programmers, they lose the power to command a huge salary writing software and to "bully" non-technical people in the company around.

Traditional programmers are no longer some of the highest paid tech people around. It's AI engineers/researchers. Obviously many software devs can transition into AI devs but it involves learning, starting from the bottom, etc. For older entrenched programmers, it's not always easy to transition from something they're familiar with.

Losing the ability to "bully" business people inside tech companies is a hard pill to swallow for many software devs. I remember the CEO of my tech company having to bend the knees to keep the software team happy so they don't leave and because he doesn't have insights into how the software is written. Meanwhile, he had no problem overwhelming business folks in meetings. Software devs always talked to the CEO with confidence because they knew something he didn't, the code.

When a product manager can generate a highly detailed and working demo of what he wants in 5 minutes using gen AI, the traditional software developer loses a ton of power in tech companies.

/signed as someone who writes software

> When a product manager can generate a highly detailed and working demo of what he wants in 5 minutes using gen AI, the traditional software developer loses a ton of power in tech companies.

Yeah, software devs will probably be pretty upset in the way you describe once that happens. In the present though, what's actually happened is that product managers can have an LLM generate a project template and minimally interactive mockup in five minutes or less, and then mentally devalue the work that goes into making that into an actual product. They got it to 80% in 5 minutes after all, surely the devs can just poke and prod Claude a bit more to get the details sorted!

The jury is out on how productivity is impacted by LLM use. That makes sense, considering we never really figured out how to measure baseline productivity in any case.

What we know for sure is: non-engineers still can't do engineering work, and a lot of non-engineers are now convinced that software engineering is basically fully automated so they can finally treat their engineers like interchangeable cogs in an assembly line.

The dynamic would be totally different if LLMs actually brodged the brain-computer barrier and enabled near-frictionless generation of programs that match an arbitrary specification. Software engineering would change dramatically, but ultimately it would be a revolution or evolution of the discipline. As things stand major software houses and tech companies are cutting back and regressing in quality.

He's mainly talking about environmental & social consequences now and in the future. He personally is beyond reach of such consequences given his seniority and age, so this speculative tangent is detracting from his main point, to put it charitably.

I'm not entirely convinced it's going to lead to programmers losing the power to command high salaries. Now that nearly anyone can generate thousands upon thousands of lines of mediocre-to-bad code, they will likely be the doing exactly that without really being able to understand what they're doing and as such there will always be the need for humans who can actually read and actually understand code when a billion unforeseen consequences pop up from deploying code without oversight.

> I remember the CEO of my tech company having to bend the knees to keep the software team happy so they don't leave and because he doesn't have insights into how the software is written.

It is precisely the lack of knowledge and greed of leadership everywhere that's the problem.

The new screwdriver salesmen are selling them as if they are the best invention since the wheel. The naive boss having paid huge money is expecting the workers to deliver 10x work while the new screwdriver's effectiveness is nowhere closer to the sales pitch and it creates fragile items or more work at worst. People are accusing that the workers are complaining about screwdrivers because they can potentially replace them.

Really think it’s entirely wrong to label someone as a bully for not conforming to current, perhaps bad, practices.

If you don't bend your knee to a "king", you are a bully? What sort of messed up thinking is that?

I'm a programmer, and am intensely aware of the huge gap between the quantity of software the world could use and the total production capacity of the existing body of programmers. my distaste for AI has nothing to do with some real or imagined loss of power; if there were genuinely a system that produced good code and wasn't heavily geared towards reinforcing various structural inequalities I would be all for it. AI does not produce good code, and pretty much all the uses I've seen are trying to give people with power even more advantages and leverage over people without, so I remain against it.

I understand that you are writing your general opinion, but I have a feeling Rob Pike's feelings go a little bit deeper than this.

I keep reading bad sentiment towards software devs. Why exactly do they "bully" business people? If you ask someone outside of the tech sector who the biggest bullies are, its business people who will fire you if they can save a few cents. Whenever someone writes this, I read deep rooted insecurity and jealousy for something they can't wrap their head around and genuinely question if that person really writes software or just claims to do it for credibility.

People care far less about gen AI writing slopcode and more about the social and environmental ramifications, not to mention the blatant IP theft, economic games, etc.

I'm fine if AI takes my job as a software dev. I'm not fine if it's used to replace artists, or if it's used to sink the economy or planet. Or if it's used to generate a bunch of shit code that make the state of software even worse than it is today.

I realize you said "many" and not "all" but FWIW, I hate LLMs because:

1. My coworkers now submit PRs with absolutely insane code. When asked "why" they created that monstrosity, it is "because the AI told me to".

2. My coworkers who don't understand the difference between SFTP and SMTP will now argue with me on PRs by feeding my comments into an LLM and pasting the response verbatim. It's obvious because they are suddenly arguing about stuff they know nothing about. Before, I just had to be right. Now I have to be right AND waste a bunch of time.

3. Everyone who thinks generating a large pile of AI slop as "documentation" is a good thing. Documentation used to be valuable to read because a human thought that information was valuable enough to write down. Each word had a cost and therefore a minimum barrier to existence. Now you can fill entire libraries with valueless drivel.

4. It is automated copyright infringement. All of my side projects are released under the 0BSD license so this doesn't personally impact me, but that doesn't make stealing from less permissively licensed projects without attribution suddenly okay.

5. And then there are the impacts to society:

5a. OpenAI just made every computer for the next couple of years significantly more expensive.

5b. All the AI companies are using absurd amounts of resources, accelerating global warming and raising prices for everyone.

5c. Surveillance is about to get significantly more intrusive and comprehensive (and dangerously wrong, mistaking doritos bags for guns...).

5d. Fools are trusting LLM responses without verification. We've already seen this countless times by lawyers citing cases which do not exist. How long until your doctor misdiagnoses you because they trusted an LLM instead of using their own eyes+brain? How long until doctors are essentially forced to do that by bosses who expect 10x output because the LLM should be speeding everything up? How many minutes per patient are they going to be allowed?

5e. Astroturfing is becoming significantly cheaper and widespread.

/signed as I also write software, as I assume almost everyone on this forum does.

And this is different from outsourcing the work to India for programmers who work for $6000 a year in what way exactly?

You can go back to the 1960s and COBOL was making the exact same claims as Gen AI today.

What does any of this have to do with what Rob has written?

You're absolutely right.

But no one is safe. Soon the AI will be better at CEOing.

There's still a lot of confusion on where AI is going to land - there's no doubt that it's helpful, much the same way as spell checkers, IDEs, linters, grammarly, etc, were

But the current layoffs "because AI is taking over" is pure BS, there was an overhire during the lockdowns, and now there's a correction (recall that people were complaining for a while that they landed a job at FAANG only for it to be doing... nothing)

That correction is what's affecting salaries (and "power"), not AI.

/signed someone actually interested in AI and SWE

> When a product manager can generate a highly detailed and working demo of what he wants in 5 minutes using gen AI

The GenAI is also better at analyzing telemetry, designing features and prioritizing issues than a human product manager.

Nobody is really safe.

Many people have pointed out that if AI gets better at writing code and doesn't generate slop, then programmers' roles will evolve to Project Manager. People with tech backgrounds will still be needed until AI can completely take over without any human involvement.

Nope and I wholeheartedly agree with Pike for the disgust of these companies especially for what they are doing to the planet.

Very true... AI engineers earning $100mn, I doubt Rob Pike earnt that. Maybe $10mn.

This is the reality and started happening at faster pace. A junior engineer is able to produce something interesting faster without too much attitude.

Everybody in the company envy the developers and they respect they get especially the sales people.

The golden era of devs as kings started crumbling.