>> The computers will come for all of our jobs eventually, but those of us who refuse or decline to embrace the most powerful creative tools we’ve ever been given will be the first to fall.
It's being mandated by almost all companies. We're forced to use it, whether it produces good results or not. I can change a one-line code faster than Claude Code can, as long as I understand the code. Someday, I'll lose understanding of the code, because I didn't write it. What am I embracing?
Times change, you have to learn new tools or get left behind. Nobody is asking if you like it, even expecting your personal preferences to matter and be taken seriously is a serious example of privilege.
I'm serious. Your boss comes to you and tells you to use AI, how is that any different from the foreman of an experienced carpentry / framing crew coming up to his old pros and handing them a pneumatic nail gun, and telling them to put down the hammers? You think they didn't complain, these men who pride themselves in being able to drive a nail with fewer swings than others? These men who are super fast and experienced with hammers and took pride in that, even enjoyed their work, do you think they were happy when their boss, some unskilled management bitch, showed that he could drive nails faster than they could just by pulling a trigger? They hated it! And it didn't matter, they had to adapt. Why should programmers be more privileged?
Your boss tells you to use AI because he gave it a task that took you a day to complete and the AI did it in five minutes. Your boss doesn't care about your skill with an obsolete craft, or the art or aesthetic qualities of coding by hand, or even the supposed quality benefits of doing it by hand. None of that matters when the new tool can demonstrably work faster. Your boss sees it himself, then sees you complaining, and he then sees you as an old veteran complaining about the new way of things. Complain all you want, you either learn to keep up or you'll get left behind.
> Someday, I'll lose understanding of the code, because I didn't write it.
I've been wading through vast corporate codebases I never wrote and yet had to understand for the past 20 years. This isn't any different, and AI tools help with that understanding. A lot!
Intersting observation. There is a difference however. Pre-AI each human programmer understood the code they wrote, in general. So there were many humans who understood some part of the code. Poast-AI there will be no humans who understand any code, presumably. Sure we will understand its syntax, but the overall architecture of applications may be so complicated that no human can understand it, in practice.
You're not embracing it, you're forced to accept it because the nature of employer-employee relationships has a fundamental power differential which makes it exploitative.
You helped build the company, you should own a proportional part of it.
The issue with the current system is that only the people who provide money, not the people who provide work, get to own the result. Work (and natural resources) is where value comes from. Their money came from work as well but not only their work, they were in a position of power which allowed them to get a larger cut than deserved. Ownership should, by law, be distributed according to the amount and skill level of work.
Then people wouldn't worry about losing their jobs to automation - because they'd keep receiving dividends from the value of their previous work.
If their previous work allowed the company to buy a robot to replace them, great, they now get the revenue from the robot's work while being free to pursue other things in their now free time.
If their previous work allowed an LLM to be trained or rented to replace them, great, they get get the revenue from the LLM's work...
Crapitalism didn't let up for the benifit of the old veteran framers who didn't want to use nailguns, why should it let up for the benifit of old veteran programmers who don't want to use LLMs? We aren't special. Expecting a shakeup of society's whole economic system just to preserve your preference for old tools is totally out to lunch.
Because a shakeup only happens when enough people get fucked sufficiently.
I think you underestimate how actual AI would change the economy. All white collar jobs gone, not just programmers - customer support, accountants, managers, therapists, teachers, lawyers, engineers, researchers, designers, HR, marketing. All gone. Everything you can do from home - gone. IF your job doesn't involve physical interaction with the world - gone. And even if it does, it's cheaper to strap a camera to someone's forehead and let actual AI tell him what to do.
These people will still need to eat and they are highly competent so they'll try to get into careers which require manual skill, driving the value of those down as well. And that's even before robotics get sufficiently advanced to stop replacing those. Everyone will get fucked except those who own the AI companies.
Used to be people sold capitalism as something that gave freedom to individuals. Now it's just the thing that forces us to to act against what we believe is best for ourselves and society at large. Anyone who expresses distaste for that is of course, out to lunch.
I'm not selling capitalism. I'm telling you that society is indifferent to your desire to program in the old ways, we're not going to start a worker's revolution for the sake of programmers who don't like coding agents. You can either adapt, or get left behind.
See my comment above - you still see AI as a tool because you're only considering what I call "AI" instead of aAI (actual AI).
Imagine Stephen Hawking level genius at every area of expertise, able to think faster than any human and cheaper than minimum wage but unable to interact with the physical world.
That's not a tool you adapt to use, that's a tool the owners of your company replace everyone with, except ironically those roughly minimum wage manual workers.
Since in my system, you cannot buy ownership of a corporate person (just like you cannot buy a natural person, for good reasons), that severely limits how such a situation could arise in the first place.
You still get paid a salary, you can still save up or invest it, it's just that money only buys you ownership according to how much work (times * skill) you put in to make that money.
Any system based on market competition in which your scenario realistically happens was probably so degenerate it would end up being replaced (whether democratically or by force). My system, AFAICT, is strictly (in the mathematical sense) better than the current implementation of capitalism, it just has extra precautions against buying power. What it boils down to is you want a perfect system while I am proposing a system that's better than the current state and you reject it based on not being perfect.
BTW a part of your comment is a condescending personal attack which doesn't add to the discussion and is against the guidelines.
It's a skill set just like coding. You can embrace an elevated workflow where you can forget about the specific syntax and focus on the architecture and integration. It takes time to intuit what exactly the models are bad at, so you can forsee hallucinations and prevent them from happening in the first place. Yes you can write 1 line faster than Claude, but what about 10 lines? 100? 1000?
> Yes you can write 1 line faster than Claude, but what about 10 lines? 100? 1000?
Bingo. One quick edit when you already know what needs to be done is trivial, that means nothing. What happens when you have to write a new feature and it will take hundreds of lines of code? Unless you're an elder god of programming, the LLM will lap you easily.
>> But AI has sucked the joy of the craft even in my free time.
I agree, and you are not alone. Those who love the craft of programming are forced into a weird situation, and that's where AI sucks away soul.
Perspective and patience changes many things. Work on altering perception by taking workshops, classes, volunteering, reading, poetry, etc. Whatever as long as it's something you haven't experienced before.
Also, I think it's okay to work on your own projects without AI slop-coding. This is how we learn, by doing. There is still expertise to be gained.
A family member recently died from this. It was gut-wrenching to watch the fast decay of life happen, once full of life, then death, with three years. I donated to find a cure.
I'm glad it has helped you. I've used it for some mild life experiences, but I am suspicious about sharing deep emotional experiences with a private company that stores everything. I wonder if creating a throw-away account would offer more anonymity.
I thought about that as well. It's certainly a concern.
In the end I decided that the concrete benefits from giving Anthropic access to this kind of data outweigh the potential risks. Granted, they might be banking on me making this exact, naieve calculation, but still.
The co-CEO gives a terrible example. A developer is working while commuting? How clear is one's thinking skills during that time? How safe is that to deploy a production commit? Does Spotify test in prod?
>> For me it's a highly rewarding and enjoyable activity, just like studying mathematics. Nevertheless, the main motivator for me has been always the final outcome
There are two attitudes stemming from the LLM coding movement, those who enjoyed the craft of coding MORE, and those who enjoy seeing the final output MORE.
I agree with the nolanlawson's sentiment. What's interesting is many of the opposing statements here seem to be less interested in the actual code, and more interested in the final state. Both are valid, but one is going away due to technological advancements. That is the mourning.
There are some of us who enjoyed the code as a thing to explore. Others here don't seem to like that as much.
I've never bought into it because like 80% of the work the world does is CRUD-level stuff which should be boring and simple so it can be readable and maintainable.
The craftspeople doing the other 20% of the code are at the top end of the skill spectrum, but AI is starting from the bottom and working its way up. They should be the least worried about AI taking over their output.
This is like throwing together dozens of stick frame homes that look alike vs. building custom log, brick, or stone houses. No one is going to be tearing down my drywall and marveling at how well the studs are spaced.
Even if I were retired and financially set now, that would mean nothing in 10 years if an unemployed society collapses around me. Apathy is not on the menu today.
>People who have reaped the rewards of their careers tend not to be the ones concerned about their futures. Apathy.
Not everyone has to become a programmer, people at the start of their careers can chooses paths other than programming if they're afraid of the (lack of) future prospects from AI. Where did people work before the ZIRP boom? Those industries are still around. Plenty of STEM related jobs besides programing.
Computers did feel like magic... until I read code, think about it, understood it, and could control it. I feel we're stepping away from that, and moving to a place of less control, less thinking.
I liked programming, it was fun, and I understood it. Now it's gone.
It's not gone, it's just being increasingly discouraged. You don't have to "vibe code" or spend paragraphs trying to talk a chatbot into doing something that you can do yourself with a few lines of code. You'll be fine. It's the people who could have been the next few generations of programmers who will suffer the most.
It's being mandated by almost all companies. We're forced to use it, whether it produces good results or not. I can change a one-line code faster than Claude Code can, as long as I understand the code. Someday, I'll lose understanding of the code, because I didn't write it. What am I embracing?
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