Like the artisans/craftsmen in many places (especially Japan), hand craft will always carry enduring meaning — machines ultimately can't replace everything humans shape with their hands. But historically at least, they can replace over 99.9% of it.
Mario Savio said a few lines when the industrial revolution peaked:
There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious
Makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part
And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels
Upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop
And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it
That unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all
Even then we have machines doing it all and yet we all function well.
I think eventually this would be a tool usage which will take human intelligence to another pinnacle.
I see no indication that current human intelligence is at anything close to a historical pinnacle. Human knowledge, yes, but intelligence? No. Collectively, we're dumb and trending dumber, and the tendency towards lazy thoughtlessness which AI engenders will accelerate that trend.
What do you mean by intelligence? And by your definition of it, can intelligence be improved intentionally or it happens as it happens like for evolution? If it happens by intention then why we have not pushed it at its maximium yet?
A slop fork machine is way different though, I dont know why authors never thought about this but imagine a machine that can detect the features and replicate whatever it sees, show it how to make bread once and it can do it infinitely, make it listen to a song and its able to find why it sounds the way it does and just spam variations, even if it doesnt make anything original it demotivates any attempt to push the boundaries or make anything new
Really? I'm more motivated than ever to make stuff at the moment. I have a long list of projects I've always wanted to make, but I never had time. The barrier is so low now.
For example, I want to make:
- A mini OS on top of SeL4
- A UI framework based on SolidJS, for native apps, in rust.
- My own photo manager (which can do backups & sync across all my devices). And a gallery to share photos with friends
- A local first data store, built on top of CRDTs
- My own programming language
And lots more.
Each of these projects on their own would take months of time. If LLMs can speed up development, that's great! I don't care if nobody else uses what I make. I want a personal computer full of my own software.
Everything I want to make is new. I don't understand the objection.
For example, the photo backup system I want to make will let me manage my ~400gb photo library. I want my library backed up on a couple devices, running linux and freebsd. I want my mac and iphone to have a local mirror of all the favorited photos, and when I'm at home, I want to be able to browse all photos from those devices by streaming them over the local network. I want native macos & ios app interfaces to view and manage all that.
I don't know any existing software that meets my requirements. I don't think any such software exists. Apple, Dropbox and Google will solve this problem for me if I store all my photos in their cloud and pay them an ongoing subscription for the privilege. I'd much rather make something myself, and back up my photos on my own hard drives.
Making something like this is simple enough, but very time consuming. If claude can take the drudgery out of it, well, I think that's just delightful.
What's your time and life worth? You pay Apple to deal with it (which I do) and get to live a peaceful life and go out and take photos and have experiences. Or do you spend weeks implementing your own solution with Claude. The latter is considerably higher cost in time and money.
AI is seen as a way out of drudgery but you're just trading one problem for another.
You can accomplish most of that by installing Syncthing.
But the objection is that you’re not really building anything new even if you think it’s a new idea. By your definition you’re building for yourself and not sharing…so what good are your little projects. Reading your original list it just seems like you want to build and run software without having to do any research, even if a solution already exists.
I'm glad that you find achievement in the personal challenge. At home, I'm just getting things done. Small things, bigger things, and best of all I get to pet the dog more while it works in the background.
> Even then we have machines doing it all and yet we all function well. I think eventually this would be a tool usage which will take human intelligence to another pinnacle.
How? It's undermining what the human intellicence is made from, learning.
Hasn't all automation up to this point been same input equals same output though? Automation using LLMs feels different to anything before and I don't think there's a comparative time in history to point at and say "look it happened before and we are now better off"
I think we all been fooled by the sentence: "It's yet another automation, it's like horses were replaced by cars". It is not. Industrialization and automation is about manual labor. LLM/AI is about outsourcing thinking. And while I'll give two thumbs up for using ML(there is not 'I' in 'AI') as a technology for some tasks, outsourcing thinking is an evolutionary dead-end.
Its advertised as outsourcing thinking, but I doubt many serious people making serious things actually outsourced their thinking very much. I definitely outsource my typing, search, and LSP interaction!
No it isn't. I still do the thinking on how to solve my problems, I only outsource the tedious part, which is typing the code and fixing the syntax errors till it all compiles and does what I want.
If you also outsource thinking to it, that's your choice though. Or the company's choice. But ultimately the free market will deiced with products made using LLMs outcompete those made without.
It shouldn't be used for that either. The problem is our programming languages and tools are shit so we made another expensive tool to drive them.
I've said this elsewhere before but I single-handedly produced more actual tangible business value with Microsoft Access than anything else since. What was an hour's work is now a procurement process and thousands of lines of tedious configuration and boilerplate that involves pipelines and tens of services all coordinated and hosted by someone who has created a moat to extract money out of me.
All I want is a fucking report.
The LLM makes us blind to the gigantic fucking shit show we built.
It’s worse— it’s seeking to replace every single aspect of what it means to be YOU in the world. Some people are literally trying to “fire themselves” and be replaced with digital twins. Perhaps those people are independently wealthy and also have no need of human connection? For the rest of us, it is a sickening prospect.
AI is automated irresponsibility, and it is nothing like any earlier transition.
When a technology trend means people literally won’t be able to tell if you are living or dead, and also stop caring about the difference— that’s unprecedented in the history of humans.
The automation at least built unimaginable amounts of wealth for the rich people while the poor people are essentially just as poor they were hundreds of years ago.
>while the poor people are essentially just as poor they were hundreds of years ago.
How can people say false things like this with a straight face?
Thanks to industrialisation, automation and mass production, the poor of today have access to things that even kings from hundreds of years ago couldn't even fathom, let alone poor people back then: abundant cheap food that poor people can now be fat instead of starve to death, cars, planes, MRI machines, helicopter ambulances, vaccines, personal heating and air conditioning, OZEMPIC, etc
Kings back then would eat hard bread, shit down a vertical shaft that emitted the scent through the whole castle, and their sleeping chambers had ice on the walls in winter and lice in the clothes and bet sheets, plus they had parasites in their gut and any small disease could kill you.
Meanwhile the cool homeless guy outside my building has 3 hot meals a day and a daily shower in the homeless shelter nearby, warm clean sleeping bag for winter, shades for summer, a bicycle for moving around town, a smartphone which he uses to watch youtube all day in his sleeping bag, plus access to medical care that kings of kings never had. All this with no job, and no care in the world.
Mainly all due to what is the spiritual successor to slave labor, not industrialization.
You can thank people dying in Chinese and African mines to extract the resources to build your planes and MRI machines.
You can thank the people working tirelessly until their hands are crippled in bengladesh to make the cheap clothes that make it seem to your western eyes that a poor person here can live a life of luxury. Those people are constantly invisibilised even as tragedies such as
hit them and kills a thousand under your total westoid apathy.
You can thank the Chinese slave labor making iPhones and Macbooks at foxconn for your luxurious electronics being cheap enough for a western wallet. They have suicide prevention nets so that their precious slave labor doesn't die from jumping from their buildings. How amazing.
>the poor of today have access to things that even kings from hundreds of years ago couldn't even fathom
Indeed, the wealth that kings couldn't dream of hundreds of years ago, because kings back then didn't have the power a billionaire can wield today to pollute, enslave and ruin millions of lives at a scale that makes things like the Napoleon wars look like a footnote to history.
>All this with no job, and no care in the world.
This can only happen because the extreme wealth inequality of the world has divided entire countries into classes of people. You are blind to the reality of the humans you are exploiting.
Also, how nice of you to ignore my entire argument on how the poor today are NOT as poor as they were hundreds of years ago, and instead sidetrack the conversation one offtopic tangent for a cheap jab in the name of scoring some emotional virtue signaling brownie points.
No, because you still need a skilled human operator in the loop for clearly defining the input and to check the output.
Machinists and lathe operators became CNC operators, they didn't lose their jobs, just that instead of turning the inputs by hand, they punch numbers in a machine, but the advent of CNC didn't mean anyone off the street can now punch numbers in the machine and replace the machinists since you still need the years of training and experience.
SW devs will be the new CNC operators, about knowing what data to input and how to wrangle the slop machine to get the desired output faster and better than your competition.
> No because you still need a skilled human operator in the loop for clearly defining the input and to check the output.
For now. Will that be true in 12 months? 4 years?
If you're a programmer, your skills have been devalued significantly in the last 12 months. What makes you think the remaining value you offer will be required 12 months from now?
I don't have a crystal ball. In 4 years whoever is US president might start another war and fuck the whole planet back to the stone age. Nobody will know what will happen in 4 years so why worry about it?
This article was very eye-opening for me. I think I understand the author's pain and I could certainly feel it while reading the article. The fact that it was "the people" that made the difference kind of surprised me, and then I realized it was because I have seldom had the experiences he's had and that this might have a major impact on the way I (and others) view the technology.
For me, building software has often been a solitary process in which I was far more obsessed with it than those around me. I'm not in a tech-heavy area and I don't have a ton of well-informed people to talk to about programming, software engineering, or AI. I have had experiences like the author in which I needed to learn a new technology or a new language but ended up doing so on my own at home, not with the assistance of a much more knowledgeable developer with significantly more experience.
To me LLMs have left us in a situation where the following things are true and moving forward lies somewhere in figuring out how to reconcile / resolve these things:
- You can use LLMs and learn things or not learn things; this is a result of the approach, desire, and willpower of the user.
- There is a level of skill associated with using LLMs much like nearly everything else in existence. The user's skill level impacts their perception of the technology and also affects the way those around them view the technology. Unskilled users will generate more negative sentiment.
- Some people love to do the things the machine is good at and do not want the machine to do them, while others hate to do the things the machine is good at and want the machine to do them. I realized at some point this year that I don't love programming anywhere near as much as I love building and designing systems and solving problems.
- Software development is many things wrapped up in one and talking about it as a single thing makes it more confusing. Some people like to think through the logic of the application and have an LLM write the code while others want the LLM to think up the solution, implement it, and test it. These are two very different people with likely different goals and different desires.
- When someone else looks at Claude or ChatGPT they might see something completely different than what you see.
I can relate to this article. My reaction to what is happening is also: "Leave me behind".
However, missing the joy of the old-school way of growing as a developer is not only the wrong reason, but also very dangerous according to Darwin.
Our customers don't care about how it is made after all, but they do care about long-term support, costs, and predictability, etc.
But I'm not sure whether we can say we made a real net positive progress in the industry. The whole thing is a big mess. In many cases, AI moves us in the same direction in turbo mode, making it not only messier and more expensive but also dangerous.
I tell them, "Leave me alone", as I see this mess as an opportunity if you think the right way, starting from the first principles.
I absolutely understand this sentiment. I've been working in tech since the late 90s and I have had MORE than my share of let-me-off-this-ride moments.
But this post (and the many I see like it) feels like giving up. And now's not the time for empathetic people to give up.
Technology is how we expand human capability. We are well within our rights to pick and choose how we interact with that capability. But it's starting to terrify me how it seems that the worst people in the world are more than willing to wield this power, while good people opt out. Billionaires are doing a remarkable job at making their vision of the future seem inevitable. Don't fall for it.
If more people aren't willing to help us steer this capability towards a better future, then we all know how this ends.
Its classic HN to dismiss the emotional cost of change as sunk cost stages of grief. A person is allowed to love their work and miss deep understanding, and allowed to be nostalgic for a preferred way of working. It's human and everything they have shared in this post is unequivocally true about software dev and moving into a career, arguably even before LLMs took over.
What I mean is that the thrilling buddy system coding starts to happen less frequently over a career, and the time for deep exploring and side projects is organically maximized early and during school.
While LLMs have forced that divide to be more stark, the human connection and sense of wonder has always required maintenance, and it's best to get into the habit of maintaining it before your 36th JIRA triage meeting in a week completely destroyed your love of the industry.
Well before LLMs I went through exactly what TFA describes when I had to adapt from grad school labs to industrial labs, then to project management or task leadership (even just filling in for my boss), and each new job has required me to say goodbye to great friends and colleagues and make new ones.
Its just inevitable to fall out of love of the craft, we all could probably write this post for our own reasons.
> Its just inevitable to fall out of love of the craft
This is not some kind of universal truth. I can see how being stuck in an unfulfilling job could lead you to say this. But for the last 20+ years I love the craft of writing efficient, dependable, understandable code more with every new insight from every experience.
I don't think AI changed anything at all to the possibility of communicating between humans. This is a job that you've always been able to do alone in your cave.
Really? How do you learn how to code with out communicating with another human? Which man pages in a general Linux install will teach you all you need to know? Without communication you get no books, no StackOverflow, no-LLMs even. You were allowed to do it alone but we can't pretend humans communicating isn't how most of the available knowledge for your perusal came to be.
The funniest thing about this post is that Java Android programming circa 2014 is somehow romanticized as "real programming." 2014 Android code has got to be peak corpo-slop with the most inane abstractions, unintuitive paradigms, and copy-paste boilerplate syndrome. Ironically, exactly why we need AI these days, since like 90% of the code you wrote didn't technically do anything.
Per learning from others after encountering an unfamiliar problem, I think there are rose-tinted glasses here. 90%+ of the time, either someone else had already provided the relevant answer at Stack Overflow or I could find it on a documentation page, a blog. There is no social engagement then. Just search. That also hasn't gone away, as LLMs can also provide sources to justify their answers.
Per the human element, the author is in part relaying about formative experiences from youth that you won't easily repeat, and also experiences that simply are not decoupled from the work as it still exists, unless you are entirely remote which has nothing to do with AI.
All of which to say, this is a bit dramatic and overstated. The emotional element behind it is valid, but the diagnosis is off the mark. I think the human element, should it be jeopardized, is in part through the complacent convenience of remote work and disinterest in community participation. But, communities still exist, and tech communities historically were always niche. As it stands they're probably bigger now than they ever were, LLMs or not.
Nice read, and agreed, leave me behind. I have been telling people that I am running a John Henry experiment with LLMs. I don't use them just so I can prove the human is better than the machine, even if it leaves me in the dirt like John.
The lack of humanity or ability to empathize with someone else’s feelings displayed in these comments, instead labeling the author’s personal experience as “main character syndrome” or “cope” demonstrates to me that the author may be correct that AI usage degrades the human experience.
It also is a great example of why AI has such a PR problem among normal people.
Frustratingly, these attitudes have been around long before LLMs, and they'll continue to exist long after. To those individuals who have staunchly refused to broaden their horizons or empathize with their fellow man, these posts are direct threats to the wagons they've hitched themselves to, a challenge to their own narrow passions because they exist in a zero-sum environment where if even one person doesn't think and act like them, then clearly they're in the obvious wrong.
Conflating a preference for manual creation with opposition to the existence of a tool should be the single biggest signal flare that they are someone who will not argue with you in good faith. They're the ones who barnstorm every single one of these posts to denigrate the author rather than even attempt to empathize with their plight or evaluate the validity of their arguments. Surely the current cohort of HN commenters have seen this repeatedly in just the past five years as technical circles have jumped from cryptocurrency to blockchain to NFTs to LLMs to GenAI; every single one is a "must have", every single one something we "must learn or be left behind forever", and every single one refused to be evaluated on its merits in favor of simply embracing something new for its novelty.
I have given up debating with these people, because they do not wish for debate, they wish for dominance. I have better things to do with my time - as do you, as do all of us - than to give a moment of consideration to a viewpoint that relies on pithy quotes out of context and a reductionist narrative of history to justify their own superiority over others, in lieu of nuanced discourse.
Remember that it is not the obligation of the status quo to defend itself, rather the obligation belongs to those advocating changes to justify and defend their position and its benefits. In that regard, the pro-AI camp continues to come up hollow and empty.
> instead labeling the author’s personal experience as “main character syndrome” or “cope” demonstrates to me that the author may be correct that AI usage degrades the human experience.
I’ll be the devil’s advocate and suggest that it might not be AI usage, but the technology attracting vilest scum of the Earth. It’s just they were staying mostly silent before, or wasted someone else’s time in different circles.
people need to reframe coding agent usage. i see a lot of framing in zero-sum terms where it's either all dev or all agent, and then people start dooming and glooming over the latter. in reality it's like that one post on here a few days ago about it being like an iron man suit. it is a glowing, bright white power that can be incredible when wielded properly. unfortunately, people characterize it as an adversarial power that can and will take over your soul.
how about some true synergy instead of boring zero-sum people? smh. the true poetry here is that zero-sum thinking will become more of a thing of the past so there is some natural comedy with this title
This is some anecdata, but I'll share it nonetheless as I have a pretty wide network of software and security engineer friends from which I've heard the following.
Almost no one I know wants agent usage to be a zero-sum activity. There are a few oddballs who obviously only got into software for the money, so any means to that end is acceptable. That does not stop those with say-so over things like employment (and, if you're in the USA, the associated healthcare), from treating it as a zero-sum activity.
When engineers are being told to maximize token usage, are constantly being brought into meetings where they're expected to reveal their latest and greatest use of LLMs, and not using enough tokens in your role is seen as a negative, then the pressure starts to creep in. Yes, I know this is silly to most people who read this site, and I agree. It's bonkers. But there is certainly something to the idea of "AI psychosis" in upper management that is making agent use zero-sum company-wide.
That's good to know, because all I really go off of is what I see posted online which is most likely skewed towards the polarizing takes (been unemployed for a while). Sounds like some positive news though, and I hope that these tools can help empower people to the point where they don't feel shackled by their jobs by doing something like lowering the barrier and manpower needed to succeed at entrepreneurship.
That shit with upper management sounds stupid af and I've heard the same type of shit from people I know who are in other fields. I'm guessing it's happening from a combination of ignorance, FOMO, investment, etc etc. But that is more of a systemic issue than anything to do with these tools imo.
I'm in a position right now where I'm trying to decide if staying in my own field of information security is worth it to me. I have an entire project plan built out for using local models to do some crazy augmentation of my own skill set, e.g. malware development pipelines and vulnerability research.
My biggest problem as an independent contractor is marketing and notoriety. Security has been a race to the bottom for over a decade now, but it's gotten exponentially worse. LLMs can't just do my job, but there are enough people with checkbooks who believe that it can and enough companies out there with an incentive to confirm that belief that it's getting harder for me to find work organically.
This psychosis you keep referring to will only end up punishing the ones who subscribe to it wouldn't it? Since it's out of touch with reality.
If that's indeed the case, then it sounds like an opportunity to get ahead of them since you know they will trip and fall at some point.
That's what I make of what you're describing, while sleep deprived and having given it some light thought LOL. So take that with a lot of salt. But it's kind of what I've been thinking these days anyways. Add to that that entrepreneurship is most likely getting empowered, and I think investing in yourself is the move these days. It will probably characterize the coming years strongly.
I would like to think they'll be the only ones punished, should punishment come. And as a disclaimer for what I'm about to say, I'm neither a Wall Street banker nor an AI company executive, so I don't want to accidentally make a specious connection between the two, but...
The 2008 housing crisis affected everyone. Bubbles that get too big pop across the population, whether they're complicit or not. As a little guy in a big world, with no expertise to truly know if there's a meaningful difference, I have a bit of anxiety about it all. I just don't want to catch collateral.
> These LLMs are prediction machines. They are text generators that are ultimately a bunch of fancy statistics
Yeah yeah back to Reddit
For real though: you can keep doing artisanal hand-written code as a hobby. Just like you can still write a web server in assembly if you really want to. But that’s just not how professional software development is done anymore. Just a new tool, I don’t think it’s as deep as the author is making it out to be.
This will inevitably lead to tired discussion of “there are two types of developers, those who care about the craft and those who want to get things” done. I believe that to be a false dichotomy, and will link to someone else’s comment in another thread who makes the argument that caring about the craft is part of caring about the product.
More specifically to the submission, I’ll say I agree with the author. This “being left behind” fear mongering is an exhausting uncritical talking point. Life isn’t about rushing through the end and killing yourself to be “productive”. “Being left behind” is only bad if what’s “ahead” is an improvement to your situation, and that’s not a given. Humans aren’t built to be pushed to 11 without rest. Stopping to smell the roses is good. Immediatelly thinking “how can I kill these to package the smell to sell to others at a profit” is not.
> These LLMs are prediction machines. They are text generators that are ultimately a bunch of fancy statistics, trained on the years and years of dedication by brave engineers willing to learn and build in the open. Building in the open meant we were not gatekeeping technology, but creating tangible examples for young engineers to explore, understand, and learn from.
Another grief-post with people unable to cope with the fact that the whole structure of learning and work is going to change so they resort to pseudo nostalgia and romanticism. Not to mention that "They are text generators that are ultimately a bunch of fancy statistics" is basically incorrect and belongs in 2024.
Not gonna pretend that this is anything other than the author's personal gripe with this whole thing, but this is really just the sunk cost fallacy with extra steps.
Even by trying to reassure (the reader? Himself?) that LLMs are just a tool for humans, he asserts in the final paragraph that software is no longer made by humans. Something something linotype operators.
> I desire to connect with people. I long for the days where I was vulnerable and shared my struggles with engineers who charitably stepped up to support me.
Main character syndrome. AI doesn't exist to make extroverts feel better about themselves. It's there to do the programming, no matter what humans feel about it. Please stop confusing your hobbies with the work needed to be done.
The quality of hacker news commenters has been steadily declining, yet I'm still constantly surprised by just how mentally shallow and lazy some can be
Do you even know what that means or you just saw a phrase online and like how it sounds? There’s nothing about main character here, the author doesn’t even advocate for anything.
> AI doesn't exist to make extroverts feel better about themselves. It's there to do the programming, no matter what humans feel about it. Please stop confusing your hobbies with the work needed to be done.
Like the artisans/craftsmen in many places (especially Japan), hand craft will always carry enduring meaning — machines ultimately can't replace everything humans shape with their hands. But historically at least, they can replace over 99.9% of it.
> machines ultimately can't replace everything humans shape with their hands.
What about 'machines' with hands and human-level cognition?
Mario Savio said a few lines when the industrial revolution peaked:
There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious Makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels Upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it That unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all
Even then we have machines doing it all and yet we all function well. I think eventually this would be a tool usage which will take human intelligence to another pinnacle.
> take human intelligence to another pinnacle
I see no indication that current human intelligence is at anything close to a historical pinnacle. Human knowledge, yes, but intelligence? No. Collectively, we're dumb and trending dumber, and the tendency towards lazy thoughtlessness which AI engenders will accelerate that trend.
What do you mean by intelligence? And by your definition of it, can intelligence be improved intentionally or it happens as it happens like for evolution? If it happens by intention then why we have not pushed it at its maximium yet?
Are you implying that all the scientific achievements of the last hundred years don't count somehow?
Did you perhaps miss this part:
> Human knowledge, yes, but intelligence?
of the post you responded to?
Proving the point, if anything.
Who is "we"? Do you operate a machine in a factory? Do you know how someone operating a machine felt in 1900?
Mechanical replacement cannot be compared with thought replacement anyway, but the most thoughtless pro-AI comment tends to be at the top.
A slop fork machine is way different though, I dont know why authors never thought about this but imagine a machine that can detect the features and replicate whatever it sees, show it how to make bread once and it can do it infinitely, make it listen to a song and its able to find why it sounds the way it does and just spam variations, even if it doesnt make anything original it demotivates any attempt to push the boundaries or make anything new
Really? I'm more motivated than ever to make stuff at the moment. I have a long list of projects I've always wanted to make, but I never had time. The barrier is so low now.
For example, I want to make:
- A mini OS on top of SeL4
- A UI framework based on SolidJS, for native apps, in rust.
- My own photo manager (which can do backups & sync across all my devices). And a gallery to share photos with friends
- A local first data store, built on top of CRDTs
- My own programming language
And lots more.
Each of these projects on their own would take months of time. If LLMs can speed up development, that's great! I don't care if nobody else uses what I make. I want a personal computer full of my own software.
I feel the same way as you. But was unfortunately not surprised to see the replies you are getting here.
There are a ton of opportunities available right now to make new things. And make them better, more customizable, and more sovereign.
Be the change you want to see in the world, guys. Focusing only on the negative will just make your life shitty.
*Make anything "new"
Everything I want to make is new. I don't understand the objection.
For example, the photo backup system I want to make will let me manage my ~400gb photo library. I want my library backed up on a couple devices, running linux and freebsd. I want my mac and iphone to have a local mirror of all the favorited photos, and when I'm at home, I want to be able to browse all photos from those devices by streaming them over the local network. I want native macos & ios app interfaces to view and manage all that.
I don't know any existing software that meets my requirements. I don't think any such software exists. Apple, Dropbox and Google will solve this problem for me if I store all my photos in their cloud and pay them an ongoing subscription for the privilege. I'd much rather make something myself, and back up my photos on my own hard drives.
Making something like this is simple enough, but very time consuming. If claude can take the drudgery out of it, well, I think that's just delightful.
What's your time and life worth? You pay Apple to deal with it (which I do) and get to live a peaceful life and go out and take photos and have experiences. Or do you spend weeks implementing your own solution with Claude. The latter is considerably higher cost in time and money.
AI is seen as a way out of drudgery but you're just trading one problem for another.
Take a look at https://immich.app/
Ente photos is one thing and there are others.
You can accomplish most of that by installing Syncthing.
But the objection is that you’re not really building anything new even if you think it’s a new idea. By your definition you’re building for yourself and not sharing…so what good are your little projects. Reading your original list it just seems like you want to build and run software without having to do any research, even if a solution already exists.
Leisure projects for me at least are about the personal challenge and achievement. If the LLM does it, you achieved nothing.
Are you assuming that "using a LLM" automatically means "vibe coding"?
Is it not engineering anymore even if you micromanage and relegate the machine to a better typist, following patterns and doing research around?
I'm glad that you find achievement in the personal challenge. At home, I'm just getting things done. Small things, bigger things, and best of all I get to pet the dog more while it works in the background.
Yeah so don't bother. I don't write code at home. What's the point? I go on holiday once a month!
> Even then we have machines doing it all and yet we all function well. I think eventually this would be a tool usage which will take human intelligence to another pinnacle.
How? It's undermining what the human intellicence is made from, learning.
Hasn't all automation up to this point been same input equals same output though? Automation using LLMs feels different to anything before and I don't think there's a comparative time in history to point at and say "look it happened before and we are now better off"
I think we all been fooled by the sentence: "It's yet another automation, it's like horses were replaced by cars". It is not. Industrialization and automation is about manual labor. LLM/AI is about outsourcing thinking. And while I'll give two thumbs up for using ML(there is not 'I' in 'AI') as a technology for some tasks, outsourcing thinking is an evolutionary dead-end.
Thank you for writing what I want to scream every time a comparison is made to some archaic technology change.
Its advertised as outsourcing thinking, but I doubt many serious people making serious things actually outsourced their thinking very much. I definitely outsource my typing, search, and LSP interaction!
>LLM/AI is about outsourcing thinking.
No it isn't. I still do the thinking on how to solve my problems, I only outsource the tedious part, which is typing the code and fixing the syntax errors till it all compiles and does what I want.
If you also outsource thinking to it, that's your choice though. Or the company's choice. But ultimately the free market will deiced with products made using LLMs outcompete those made without.
It shouldn't be used for that either. The problem is our programming languages and tools are shit so we made another expensive tool to drive them.
I've said this elsewhere before but I single-handedly produced more actual tangible business value with Microsoft Access than anything else since. What was an hour's work is now a procurement process and thousands of lines of tedious configuration and boilerplate that involves pipelines and tens of services all coordinated and hosted by someone who has created a moat to extract money out of me.
All I want is a fucking report.
The LLM makes us blind to the gigantic fucking shit show we built.
It’s worse— it’s seeking to replace every single aspect of what it means to be YOU in the world. Some people are literally trying to “fire themselves” and be replaced with digital twins. Perhaps those people are independently wealthy and also have no need of human connection? For the rest of us, it is a sickening prospect.
AI is automated irresponsibility, and it is nothing like any earlier transition.
When a technology trend means people literally won’t be able to tell if you are living or dead, and also stop caring about the difference— that’s unprecedented in the history of humans.
The automation at least built unimaginable amounts of wealth for the rich people while the poor people are essentially just as poor they were hundreds of years ago.
>while the poor people are essentially just as poor they were hundreds of years ago.
How can people say false things like this with a straight face?
Thanks to industrialisation, automation and mass production, the poor of today have access to things that even kings from hundreds of years ago couldn't even fathom, let alone poor people back then: abundant cheap food that poor people can now be fat instead of starve to death, cars, planes, MRI machines, helicopter ambulances, vaccines, personal heating and air conditioning, OZEMPIC, etc
Kings back then would eat hard bread, shit down a vertical shaft that emitted the scent through the whole castle, and their sleeping chambers had ice on the walls in winter and lice in the clothes and bet sheets, plus they had parasites in their gut and any small disease could kill you.
Meanwhile the cool homeless guy outside my building has 3 hot meals a day and a daily shower in the homeless shelter nearby, warm clean sleeping bag for winter, shades for summer, a bicycle for moving around town, a smartphone which he uses to watch youtube all day in his sleeping bag, plus access to medical care that kings of kings never had. All this with no job, and no care in the world.
Mainly all due to what is the spiritual successor to slave labor, not industrialization.
You can thank people dying in Chinese and African mines to extract the resources to build your planes and MRI machines.
You can thank the people working tirelessly until their hands are crippled in bengladesh to make the cheap clothes that make it seem to your western eyes that a poor person here can live a life of luxury. Those people are constantly invisibilised even as tragedies such as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rana_Plaza_collapse
hit them and kills a thousand under your total westoid apathy.
You can thank the Chinese slave labor making iPhones and Macbooks at foxconn for your luxurious electronics being cheap enough for a western wallet. They have suicide prevention nets so that their precious slave labor doesn't die from jumping from their buildings. How amazing.
>the poor of today have access to things that even kings from hundreds of years ago couldn't even fathom
Indeed, the wealth that kings couldn't dream of hundreds of years ago, because kings back then didn't have the power a billionaire can wield today to pollute, enslave and ruin millions of lives at a scale that makes things like the Napoleon wars look like a footnote to history.
>All this with no job, and no care in the world.
This can only happen because the extreme wealth inequality of the world has divided entire countries into classes of people. You are blind to the reality of the humans you are exploiting.
> All this with no job, and no care in the world.
Have you ever been without a job and/or homeless to say shit like this?
yes. Have you?
Also, how nice of you to ignore my entire argument on how the poor today are NOT as poor as they were hundreds of years ago, and instead sidetrack the conversation one offtopic tangent for a cheap jab in the name of scoring some emotional virtue signaling brownie points.
No, because you still need a skilled human operator in the loop for clearly defining the input and to check the output.
Machinists and lathe operators became CNC operators, they didn't lose their jobs, just that instead of turning the inputs by hand, they punch numbers in a machine, but the advent of CNC didn't mean anyone off the street can now punch numbers in the machine and replace the machinists since you still need the years of training and experience.
SW devs will be the new CNC operators, about knowing what data to input and how to wrangle the slop machine to get the desired output faster and better than your competition.
> No because you still need a skilled human operator in the loop for clearly defining the input and to check the output.
For now. Will that be true in 12 months? 4 years?
If you're a programmer, your skills have been devalued significantly in the last 12 months. What makes you think the remaining value you offer will be required 12 months from now?
What are your plans if you truly think that that's the future?
>Will that be true in 12 months? 4 years?
I don't have a crystal ball. In 4 years whoever is US president might start another war and fuck the whole planet back to the stone age. Nobody will know what will happen in 4 years so why worry about it?
This article was very eye-opening for me. I think I understand the author's pain and I could certainly feel it while reading the article. The fact that it was "the people" that made the difference kind of surprised me, and then I realized it was because I have seldom had the experiences he's had and that this might have a major impact on the way I (and others) view the technology.
For me, building software has often been a solitary process in which I was far more obsessed with it than those around me. I'm not in a tech-heavy area and I don't have a ton of well-informed people to talk to about programming, software engineering, or AI. I have had experiences like the author in which I needed to learn a new technology or a new language but ended up doing so on my own at home, not with the assistance of a much more knowledgeable developer with significantly more experience.
To me LLMs have left us in a situation where the following things are true and moving forward lies somewhere in figuring out how to reconcile / resolve these things:
- You can use LLMs and learn things or not learn things; this is a result of the approach, desire, and willpower of the user.
- There is a level of skill associated with using LLMs much like nearly everything else in existence. The user's skill level impacts their perception of the technology and also affects the way those around them view the technology. Unskilled users will generate more negative sentiment.
- Some people love to do the things the machine is good at and do not want the machine to do them, while others hate to do the things the machine is good at and want the machine to do them. I realized at some point this year that I don't love programming anywhere near as much as I love building and designing systems and solving problems.
- Software development is many things wrapped up in one and talking about it as a single thing makes it more confusing. Some people like to think through the logic of the application and have an LLM write the code while others want the LLM to think up the solution, implement it, and test it. These are two very different people with likely different goals and different desires.
- When someone else looks at Claude or ChatGPT they might see something completely different than what you see.
I hope some of this resonates with others.
I can relate to this article. My reaction to what is happening is also: "Leave me behind".
However, missing the joy of the old-school way of growing as a developer is not only the wrong reason, but also very dangerous according to Darwin.
Our customers don't care about how it is made after all, but they do care about long-term support, costs, and predictability, etc.
But I'm not sure whether we can say we made a real net positive progress in the industry. The whole thing is a big mess. In many cases, AI moves us in the same direction in turbo mode, making it not only messier and more expensive but also dangerous.
I tell them, "Leave me alone", as I see this mess as an opportunity if you think the right way, starting from the first principles.
I absolutely understand this sentiment. I've been working in tech since the late 90s and I have had MORE than my share of let-me-off-this-ride moments.
But this post (and the many I see like it) feels like giving up. And now's not the time for empathetic people to give up.
Technology is how we expand human capability. We are well within our rights to pick and choose how we interact with that capability. But it's starting to terrify me how it seems that the worst people in the world are more than willing to wield this power, while good people opt out. Billionaires are doing a remarkable job at making their vision of the future seem inevitable. Don't fall for it.
If more people aren't willing to help us steer this capability towards a better future, then we all know how this ends.
Its classic HN to dismiss the emotional cost of change as sunk cost stages of grief. A person is allowed to love their work and miss deep understanding, and allowed to be nostalgic for a preferred way of working. It's human and everything they have shared in this post is unequivocally true about software dev and moving into a career, arguably even before LLMs took over.
What I mean is that the thrilling buddy system coding starts to happen less frequently over a career, and the time for deep exploring and side projects is organically maximized early and during school.
While LLMs have forced that divide to be more stark, the human connection and sense of wonder has always required maintenance, and it's best to get into the habit of maintaining it before your 36th JIRA triage meeting in a week completely destroyed your love of the industry.
Well before LLMs I went through exactly what TFA describes when I had to adapt from grad school labs to industrial labs, then to project management or task leadership (even just filling in for my boss), and each new job has required me to say goodbye to great friends and colleagues and make new ones.
Its just inevitable to fall out of love of the craft, we all could probably write this post for our own reasons.
> Its just inevitable to fall out of love of the craft
This is not some kind of universal truth. I can see how being stuck in an unfulfilling job could lead you to say this. But for the last 20+ years I love the craft of writing efficient, dependable, understandable code more with every new insight from every experience.
I don't think AI changed anything at all to the possibility of communicating between humans. This is a job that you've always been able to do alone in your cave.
It has. Some utter morons seem to run everything they receive and send through it at work.
I have a spreadsheet now of people I can't be fucked with.
Really? How do you learn how to code with out communicating with another human? Which man pages in a general Linux install will teach you all you need to know? Without communication you get no books, no StackOverflow, no-LLMs even. You were allowed to do it alone but we can't pretend humans communicating isn't how most of the available knowledge for your perusal came to be.
The funniest thing about this post is that Java Android programming circa 2014 is somehow romanticized as "real programming." 2014 Android code has got to be peak corpo-slop with the most inane abstractions, unintuitive paradigms, and copy-paste boilerplate syndrome. Ironically, exactly why we need AI these days, since like 90% of the code you wrote didn't technically do anything.
Per learning from others after encountering an unfamiliar problem, I think there are rose-tinted glasses here. 90%+ of the time, either someone else had already provided the relevant answer at Stack Overflow or I could find it on a documentation page, a blog. There is no social engagement then. Just search. That also hasn't gone away, as LLMs can also provide sources to justify their answers.
Per the human element, the author is in part relaying about formative experiences from youth that you won't easily repeat, and also experiences that simply are not decoupled from the work as it still exists, unless you are entirely remote which has nothing to do with AI.
All of which to say, this is a bit dramatic and overstated. The emotional element behind it is valid, but the diagnosis is off the mark. I think the human element, should it be jeopardized, is in part through the complacent convenience of remote work and disinterest in community participation. But, communities still exist, and tech communities historically were always niche. As it stands they're probably bigger now than they ever were, LLMs or not.
Nice read, and agreed, leave me behind. I have been telling people that I am running a John Henry experiment with LLMs. I don't use them just so I can prove the human is better than the machine, even if it leaves me in the dirt like John.
The lack of humanity or ability to empathize with someone else’s feelings displayed in these comments, instead labeling the author’s personal experience as “main character syndrome” or “cope” demonstrates to me that the author may be correct that AI usage degrades the human experience.
It also is a great example of why AI has such a PR problem among normal people.
Exactly this.
I’m forever getting asked for help by people who suddenly value the human experience when their machine god fails them.
Sometimes fuck ‘em because they devalued me first.
Frustratingly, these attitudes have been around long before LLMs, and they'll continue to exist long after. To those individuals who have staunchly refused to broaden their horizons or empathize with their fellow man, these posts are direct threats to the wagons they've hitched themselves to, a challenge to their own narrow passions because they exist in a zero-sum environment where if even one person doesn't think and act like them, then clearly they're in the obvious wrong.
Conflating a preference for manual creation with opposition to the existence of a tool should be the single biggest signal flare that they are someone who will not argue with you in good faith. They're the ones who barnstorm every single one of these posts to denigrate the author rather than even attempt to empathize with their plight or evaluate the validity of their arguments. Surely the current cohort of HN commenters have seen this repeatedly in just the past five years as technical circles have jumped from cryptocurrency to blockchain to NFTs to LLMs to GenAI; every single one is a "must have", every single one something we "must learn or be left behind forever", and every single one refused to be evaluated on its merits in favor of simply embracing something new for its novelty.
I have given up debating with these people, because they do not wish for debate, they wish for dominance. I have better things to do with my time - as do you, as do all of us - than to give a moment of consideration to a viewpoint that relies on pithy quotes out of context and a reductionist narrative of history to justify their own superiority over others, in lieu of nuanced discourse.
Remember that it is not the obligation of the status quo to defend itself, rather the obligation belongs to those advocating changes to justify and defend their position and its benefits. In that regard, the pro-AI camp continues to come up hollow and empty.
> instead labeling the author’s personal experience as “main character syndrome” or “cope” demonstrates to me that the author may be correct that AI usage degrades the human experience.
I’ll be the devil’s advocate and suggest that it might not be AI usage, but the technology attracting vilest scum of the Earth. It’s just they were staying mostly silent before, or wasted someone else’s time in different circles.
Ok you're doing exactly what GP said, but in the opposite direction
people need to reframe coding agent usage. i see a lot of framing in zero-sum terms where it's either all dev or all agent, and then people start dooming and glooming over the latter. in reality it's like that one post on here a few days ago about it being like an iron man suit. it is a glowing, bright white power that can be incredible when wielded properly. unfortunately, people characterize it as an adversarial power that can and will take over your soul.
how about some true synergy instead of boring zero-sum people? smh. the true poetry here is that zero-sum thinking will become more of a thing of the past so there is some natural comedy with this title
This is some anecdata, but I'll share it nonetheless as I have a pretty wide network of software and security engineer friends from which I've heard the following.
Almost no one I know wants agent usage to be a zero-sum activity. There are a few oddballs who obviously only got into software for the money, so any means to that end is acceptable. That does not stop those with say-so over things like employment (and, if you're in the USA, the associated healthcare), from treating it as a zero-sum activity.
When engineers are being told to maximize token usage, are constantly being brought into meetings where they're expected to reveal their latest and greatest use of LLMs, and not using enough tokens in your role is seen as a negative, then the pressure starts to creep in. Yes, I know this is silly to most people who read this site, and I agree. It's bonkers. But there is certainly something to the idea of "AI psychosis" in upper management that is making agent use zero-sum company-wide.
That's good to know, because all I really go off of is what I see posted online which is most likely skewed towards the polarizing takes (been unemployed for a while). Sounds like some positive news though, and I hope that these tools can help empower people to the point where they don't feel shackled by their jobs by doing something like lowering the barrier and manpower needed to succeed at entrepreneurship.
That shit with upper management sounds stupid af and I've heard the same type of shit from people I know who are in other fields. I'm guessing it's happening from a combination of ignorance, FOMO, investment, etc etc. But that is more of a systemic issue than anything to do with these tools imo.
I'm in a position right now where I'm trying to decide if staying in my own field of information security is worth it to me. I have an entire project plan built out for using local models to do some crazy augmentation of my own skill set, e.g. malware development pipelines and vulnerability research.
My biggest problem as an independent contractor is marketing and notoriety. Security has been a race to the bottom for over a decade now, but it's gotten exponentially worse. LLMs can't just do my job, but there are enough people with checkbooks who believe that it can and enough companies out there with an incentive to confirm that belief that it's getting harder for me to find work organically.
This psychosis you keep referring to will only end up punishing the ones who subscribe to it wouldn't it? Since it's out of touch with reality.
If that's indeed the case, then it sounds like an opportunity to get ahead of them since you know they will trip and fall at some point.
That's what I make of what you're describing, while sleep deprived and having given it some light thought LOL. So take that with a lot of salt. But it's kind of what I've been thinking these days anyways. Add to that that entrepreneurship is most likely getting empowered, and I think investing in yourself is the move these days. It will probably characterize the coming years strongly.
I would like to think they'll be the only ones punished, should punishment come. And as a disclaimer for what I'm about to say, I'm neither a Wall Street banker nor an AI company executive, so I don't want to accidentally make a specious connection between the two, but...
The 2008 housing crisis affected everyone. Bubbles that get too big pop across the population, whether they're complicit or not. As a little guy in a big world, with no expertise to truly know if there's a meaningful difference, I have a bit of anxiety about it all. I just don't want to catch collateral.
> These LLMs are prediction machines. They are text generators that are ultimately a bunch of fancy statistics
Yeah yeah back to Reddit
For real though: you can keep doing artisanal hand-written code as a hobby. Just like you can still write a web server in assembly if you really want to. But that’s just not how professional software development is done anymore. Just a new tool, I don’t think it’s as deep as the author is making it out to be.
This will inevitably lead to tired discussion of “there are two types of developers, those who care about the craft and those who want to get things” done. I believe that to be a false dichotomy, and will link to someone else’s comment in another thread who makes the argument that caring about the craft is part of caring about the product.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47591796
More specifically to the submission, I’ll say I agree with the author. This “being left behind” fear mongering is an exhausting uncritical talking point. Life isn’t about rushing through the end and killing yourself to be “productive”. “Being left behind” is only bad if what’s “ahead” is an improvement to your situation, and that’s not a given. Humans aren’t built to be pushed to 11 without rest. Stopping to smell the roses is good. Immediatelly thinking “how can I kill these to package the smell to sell to others at a profit” is not.
> These LLMs are prediction machines. They are text generators that are ultimately a bunch of fancy statistics, trained on the years and years of dedication by brave engineers willing to learn and build in the open. Building in the open meant we were not gatekeeping technology, but creating tangible examples for young engineers to explore, understand, and learn from.
Another grief-post with people unable to cope with the fact that the whole structure of learning and work is going to change so they resort to pseudo nostalgia and romanticism. Not to mention that "They are text generators that are ultimately a bunch of fancy statistics" is basically incorrect and belongs in 2024.
Not gonna pretend that this is anything other than the author's personal gripe with this whole thing, but this is really just the sunk cost fallacy with extra steps.
Even by trying to reassure (the reader? Himself?) that LLMs are just a tool for humans, he asserts in the final paragraph that software is no longer made by humans. Something something linotype operators.
What's your take on it?
> I desire to connect with people. I long for the days where I was vulnerable and shared my struggles with engineers who charitably stepped up to support me.
Main character syndrome. AI doesn't exist to make extroverts feel better about themselves. It's there to do the programming, no matter what humans feel about it. Please stop confusing your hobbies with the work needed to be done.
The quality of hacker news commenters has been steadily declining, yet I'm still constantly surprised by just how mentally shallow and lazy some can be
Is that something you say whenever someone doesn't follow the nostalgic hivemind ?
It's not nostalgia. It's self-awareness and importantly self-worth.
Do you respond with 'main character syndrome' to everyone who shares an opinion?
You don't even know what "main character syndrome" is.
> AI doesn't exist to make extroverts feel better about themselves
Then why are the extroverts trying to replace engineers with AI?
Because it seems to be economically the right thing to do.
Maximizing shareholder value seems like a weird thing to hold as a moral imperative.
> Main character syndrome.
Do you even know what that means or you just saw a phrase online and like how it sounds? There’s nothing about main character here, the author doesn’t even advocate for anything.
> AI doesn't exist to make extroverts feel better about themselves. It's there to do the programming, no matter what humans feel about it. Please stop confusing your hobbies with the work needed to be done.
Get help, even if it is from the AI, seriously.