I'm so frustrated by both the zealous AI bulls and the blind AI opposition.

There's a lot of issues, ranging over technical, cultural, environmental, and moral problems. But there's also obvious value. To say otherwise tells me you haven't actually tried to make use of these tools.

It's one thing to get an AI google response and feel like it's dubious, it's another thing to know what you want and have an LLM find the APIs for a framework you're not familiar with yet and put the pieces together. The only way I use AI for programming still involves a large amount of rejecting the responses and a massive amount of reading and validating.

Am I able to write things faster with LLMs, yes. Am I missing out on the work involved in learning things I would be forced to otherwise, also yes. Are coworkers pushing stuff they don't understand more, surely.

It's a mixed bag, and we need more balanced takes in the discussion around this.

Nuance has been completely lost on our society. If it doesn't spark immediate outrage or joy it has no place in our attention economy. I really wish this wasn't the case and I'm not sure how we can reverse it. Most people just aren't interested in the 'balanced takes' because it's just not exciting enough it seems sadly.

It is good to remember that the discourse is not fully real.

There are fake accounts pushing AI everywhere, and people burned out by the marketing that react positioning too aggressively in the opposite direction (particularly when it's their boss who bought into the marketing and makes unreasonable demands).

I think it's possible to acknowledge that the technology has value while still being pretty much entirely opposed to AI as it exists and is being used today. It's sort of like believing we should have a police force while also believing that pretty much every existing police force should be disbanded and reconstituted from scratch (which also generated polarizing responses), or believing you need a government while also believing that all people currently in office are crooks. It's true there might be a version of something like AI that would be a net good, but I think that's quite far from what we actually have.

> Am I able to write things faster with LLMs, yes.

LLM is great at identifying useless writing - if you have llm writing it, it should not exist.

There’s “obvious value” in lots of things that aren’t forced on us and that aren’t pretended to be something everyone is required to learn and use before sticking to their existing toolset or their preferred methods for getting things done.

Morality wise, it might have “obvious value” to poison my competitors and steal from my business partners, employees, and customers. That doesn’t mean I am obligated to “try to make use of these tools.”

> There's a lot of issues, ranging over technical, cultural, environmental, and moral problems. But there's also obvious value. To say otherwise tells me you haven't actually tried to make use of these tools.

Why would you try to make use of these tools when there are obvious environmental and moral problems with them? What do you tell yourself about those problems, and how do you get past them?

> To say otherwise tells me you haven't actually tried to make use of these tools.

There's also a lot of ideological opposition, which often tries to claim that the tech is useless etc.

> Am I missing out on the work involved in learning things I would be forced to otherwise, also yes.

Yes, but many of those things are things you might not really care about learning about. And if you want to learn about them, AI can be a big help, if you use it appropriately.

The "mixed bag" comes from the way people use it, mostly not from the tech itself.

>It's one thing to get an AI google response and feel like it's dubious, it's another thing to know what you want and have an LLM find the APIs for a framework you're not familiar with

What I'm hearing is that the 0.00001% use case is great while the 99.9999% use case is shit--and we're supposed to think that's reasonable.

Feeding nonsense to pretty much the entire population is just fine with tech bros because a few programmers have an easier time cranking out some code to more effectively sell ads?

That's not a mixed bag, friend. That's a bag of horse shit with one M&M at the bottom.

No, we can't all be friends. Never happened, never will be.