Thanks friend! Appreciate it.

Agree, the diversity of the discourse is not great. There's a lot of "omg I just got started waaauw" articles out there along with "we're all gonna die!" stuff. And then a few seams of very excellent insight.

Deep research at least helps with dowsing for the knowledge...

I rarely come across people who flat out say "it's not useful". They exist, but IME they're the minority.

Rather, I hear a lot of nuanced opinions of how the tech is useful in some scenarios, but that the net benefit is not clear. I.e. the tech has many drawbacks that make it require a lot of effort to extract actual value from. This is an opinion I personally share.

In most cases, those "big productivity gains" are vastly blown out of proportion. In the context of software development specifically, sure, you can now generate thousands of lines of code in an instant, but writing code was never the bottleneck. It was always the effort to carefully design and implement correct solutions to real-world problems. These new tools can approximate this to an extent, when given relevant context and expert guidance, but the output is always unreliable, and very difficult to verify.

So anyone who claims "big productivity gains" is likely not bothering to verify the output, which in most cases will eventually come back to haunt them and/or anyone who depends on their work. And this should concern everyone.

Before AI, there were also stories of people who had no background in software engineering who wrote entire applications using their fingers. This was called "learning to be a software engineer".

I don't mean to snipe at AI, because it really does seem to have set more people on the path of learning, but I was writing VB5 apps when I was 14 by copying poorly understood bits and pieces from books. Now people are doing basically the same but with less typing and everyone thinks it's a revolution.

Smart people can hit the ground running if they're freed from the need to first learn the intricacies of a new language. We're going to see an explosion in the number of people writing software as clever people who invested their time in something other than learning to program are now able to write software for themselves.

What is not true, that "so many software engineers are having an identity crisis"?

I don't believe they said that folks new to AI can't make impressive use of it. They did however say that senior folks with lots of scrappy and holistic knowledge can do amazing things with it. Both can be true.

I've seen people generate a lot of vibeslop with AI, but they didn't actually "Write entire applications using AI".

They still have absolutely no clue how it works, so how could they "write entire applications"? They vibed it, but they certainly didn't write any of it, not one bit of it, and they're clueless as to how to extend it, upgrade it, and maintain it so that the AI doesn't make it a bloated monstrosity of AI patches and fixes and workarounds that they simply could never begin to understand.

They were also following a dozen youtube tutorials step by step, so even that part was someone else doing the thinking.

Yeah, these are the same guys constantly bugging me to help them figure something out.

Its silly to say this but one such person is „pewdiepie”

AI Vampire is from Steve Yegge, credit where it's due.

My take is that it's similar to what Amber Case described in Calm Technology - with AI you are not steering one car, you're really steering three cars at the same time. The human mind isn't really designed for that.

I am finding that really structuring my time helps in terms of fighting back. And adopting an hours restriction, even if I could rage for 4 more hours, I don't. Instead I stop and go outside.

That's a good point. Im a novice self taught developer that somehow pushed through and made a decent PM tool for the construction industry. It works, if your users aren't malicious or too demanding.

Now I'm working on a second project, all with AI. I haven't written a single line. It works better than a non programmer would make because I knew what to ask for. But I'll admit I'm not learning anything.

> how the truly skilled will finally have their time to shine.

That's not what I said. I said that those who are already shining, are now shining even brighter. Give a great craftsman a new tool and he will find a way to apply it. If it is valueless, he will throw it away.

For what it's worth, your comment is also an HN trope, the disaffected low-effort armchair keyboard warrior.

If LLMs were vampires, they'd be better at counting, if they were fae, they'd be better at legalistic logic. :p

When C arrived, programmers wonder how software devs would look like when they won't have assembly experience.

Then the same happened with languages that managed memory.

And with IDE that could refactor your code in a click and autocomplete API calls.

And with Stack Overflow where people copy/pasted code they didn't understand.

Honestly, I think it will look pretty much like this one. There’s a lot of manual experience that the current generation doesn’t have.

For example, I haven’t racked and cabled a server in over 15 years. That used to be a valuable skill.

I also used to know how to operate Cisco switches and routers (on the original IOS!). I haven't thought about CIDR and the difference between a /24 and a /30 since the year 2008. A class IP addresses, how do those work? What subnet am I on? Is thing running on a different VLAN? Irrelevant to me these days. Some people still know it! But not as many as in the past.

The late Dr. Richard Hamming observed that once a upon a time, "a good man knew how to implement square root in machine code." If you didn't know how to do that, you weren't legit. These days nobody would make such a claim.

So some skills fade and others rise. And also, software has moved in predictable cycles for many decades at this point. We are still a very young field but we do have some history at this point.

So things will remain the same the more they change on that front.

To me, it is very scary. I know people who have sort of "outsourced" their critical thinking to chatgpt. So to me it's extra scary when I see it outside technical circles. They'll just believe whatever that generation of LLM tells them because it is doing it so confidentially and never question or check the information. Maybe I'm naive but I thought easier access to knowledge was supposed to make us more intelligent, not less.

Serious reply to this one: I truly don’t find it any more scary than what’s already taken place many times in human history.

We have hundreds and thousands of years of history showing humans committing atrocities against each other well before the advent of computers, or even the introduction of electricity. So while the tool may become so ubiquitous that there’s no option not to engage with it, I don’t think it really fundamentally alters the dynamics of human behavior.

Some people are motivated by greed. Others are motivated by nobility. It really just comes down to which wolf they're feeding.

In terms of the tool keeping people ignorant, there’s a part I agree with and a part that I don’t. I think, in terms of information dissemination, AI is probably the autocrat’s wet dream in terms of finally being able to achieve real-time redefinition of reality. That’s pretty scary, and I’m not sure what to do about it.

On the other hand, people have always been free to not really learn their craft and to just sort of get by and make a living. That was true a thousand years ago, and it’s true today. There’s always somebody who can do really a high-quality job, but they’re very expensive, and then there's a vast population who will do a medium to terrible job for less money. You get what you pay for. There's a reason history is primarily written about people with power and wealth, they were the only ones with the means to do anything.

I don’t agree with the assertion about the internet and the election of someone like Donald Trump. Well before the internet existed, politicians were using communication mediums to influence things and get elected—whether it was the telegraph, the telephone, or the TV. JFK famously was the first TV president (notably, he didn't wear a hat).

These technologies simply give politicians more reach, and they may change the dynamics of how voters are persuaded. But what’s true today was true three hundred years ago: there’s the face of power that you see publicly, and then there’s what really happens behind the scenes.

When all you've got AI, every problem looks like ... Uh, whatever hole an LLM's output goes into. A garbage can, ideally.

AI seems great when you have no way of truly validating its output.