I'm pretty sure this article is written by AI as there are lots of those long hyphens in it that AI seems so keen to use. If it is I can't tell whether that's ironic or reinforces their argument.
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
It is not “making use of it”, it is stuffing your face with chocolate and complaining about the chocolate industry. Don’t like the network? Stop using the goddamned network.
Ali Express is not mandatory. A game console is not necessary. Whining about the network ON THE NETWORK is most certainly not a necessity. Just act like an adult and drop the goddamned phone.
This isn’t a gotcha. It’s a problem that presents itself with a solution and the author seems utterly uninterested in taking it. This is complaining for the sake of complaining.
I think there is a middle ground too. Well organised Engineering and Product teams using AI efficiently whilst actually talking together and making decisions. Neither AI zealots, nor doom and gloom.
> I’m going to make a prediction of my own… In the future we will see more and more companies proudly boasting their “NO-AI” policy as a competitive advantage. And they will be right
I'm going to make my own prediction: this isn't going to happen
I'll go one further: We'll see companies proudly boasting "no humans" as a competitive advantage and arguing letting humans do certain types of work is unsafe.
Not a lot of shops these days are bragging about hand-writing machine code and a complete lack of automated testing. We had already automated so much before LLMs came into the picture.
Why would you brag abput this. Most places make perf products do not use llms to write all their code. This isnt rare. You people dont know much outside of webdev. There isnt a single defense outfit doing it lol.
I think we'll probably get both kinds of companies, but that they will both be fringe approaches, and the predominant choice will be to have humans working with AI tools.
"We're not going to use tractors to plow the fields"
"We're not going to use trucks to deliver our produce"
"We're not going to use planes to meet with our global partners"
"We're not going to use computers to run our business"
"We're not going to open a web shop, brick and mortar forever"
"We're not going to use AI to make decisions for us"
Pet peeve - luddites had never been against technology. They had been against using low paid inexperienced grunt workers to displace well paid experts.
As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”
The definition you're using is not the definition that people nowadays understand the word for.
You don't go to a magazine website for the current common meaning or understanding of a word, you go to the dictionary And in a dictionary you'll read that a luddite is someone who is opposed to new technology, automation, or industrial change.
There are countless examples where people resist new technology for various reasons other than "using low paid inexperienced grunt workers to displace well paid experts". And this is what we call luddites, not the historical original definition of the word.
It's the same vibe as "They called crazy for his ideas!"
Yes, the also called lots of actual crazy people crazy. In fact the probability of actually being crazy, given people are calling you crazy, is very high.
And why are the people calling people Luddite some of the least intelligent people I meet, and seem to be complete sheep fighting some psychological war on behalf of their billionaire lords who own the machinery.
Not wanting to hand off all your labor to a machine does not make you a luddite, nor should it be acceptable to call people that because you dont know how to have a real conversation.
It seems like "luddite" is a reasonable description for a strict "NO-AI" policy. You softened it to "not wanting to hand off all your labor" in this comment, but the word "any" would be a more apt way to describe the quote in the comment you replied to.
I already know how to code proficiently in more than 20 languages, that's the result of 40 years working in the field and being a 100X programmer. The summarizer is just a tool for myself, I build tools every day to simplify my life, not for sale, not for monetization, like tracking gym schedules or pickleball rallies with my friends, like kanban boards for my wife, they solve problems I have, not you, so that's enough for me and rewarding in itself
And AI does it all for me while I sip coffee and play mahjong (built by AI of course)
I mean this sincerely; the arrogance of calling yourself a 100X programmer is astounding. I don't know how you managed a 40 year career with that kind of attitude.
I havent met a single honest person who doesn't admit that their use or LLMs degrades their ability to do the same things without them. You're being dishonest.
What was edgy about asking someone to read a Thomas Pynchon essay on the word Luddite? Id argue their weird comment about people who don't like AI being luddites is more annoying and discriminatory.
AI maxxers know they're doing harm to themselves by overusing llms. The way they react so defensively when you point it out to them lets you know its real. Everyone wants to pretending like they have superpowers and are evolving into "100x" engineers, but in reality they're devolving.
You’re both sorta right imo. Some companies are going to try and virtue-signal artisanal AI-free code, and some will just deliver sorta what you asked for, and neither will be perfect.
I remember seeing some companies boast about "no outsourcing". I think 99% of their customers won't care for such things, as long as the customer gets what they want.
That's interesting, less than I thought. I'm curious about this because I'm working on a sudoku variant that has two pieces of data in each cell - such as numbers and letters. I am keen to try out your process with that arrangement.
https://puzzmallow.com
I build logic and word puzzles. I like to design original variants of classics like nonograms and sudoku - such as using hexes instead of a square grid, introducing new rules and concepts.
I'd like to submit my counterpoint. I work on an established codebase building new features and fixing bugs. It has access to our story board, git and a couple of other mcps. As long as the story is well written with clear requirements and expectations it always produces quality code that I validate as a human with a variety of tests automated and manual. I peer review the code. My colleagues then peer review that too.
I have noticed two things - new features take at a minimum at least half the time it took me previously and bugs are much less frequent. Even faster when bug fixing.
My takeaway is that you need solid requirements, clear context and thoughtful human oversight primarily during planning but also during verification
An established codebase is already the best kind of context you could give an agent. It has all the patterns baked in so the agent simply follows established patterns. Such a codebase probably contains tens to hundreds of thousands of man-hours poured into it by humans refining it to do what it does - taking into account real world feedback and constraints.
When working on something from scratch, the best an agent can do is the average of whatever is in its training set and the clarity of the text prompts.
> When working on something from scratch, the best an agent can do is the average of whatever is in its training set and the clarity of the text prompts.
Nah. The best it can do is to use the best writing style a model learned. Post-training might fail to prioritize it, though. Autoregressive pretraining does not average things. It creates a predictive model for variety of programming styles.
So I'm not sure what I've learnt from it!