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.
The "powers that be" would prefer if you sideline yourself. Instead, pop a bird and say "thank you kind sir, but no."
I don't subscribe to that even to begin with. Learning "how to use AI" in a a dev workflow takes less than a month, just by practice. Assuming "how to use AI" refers to using agents, rather than just a more advanced auto complete, once you've made the couple of mistakes you can make a couple of times (mainly, leave the coding agent to do something too big for too long), you're caught up. Maybe it take a little more time to get the habits into your workflow.
Leveraging a LLM for coding is orders of magnitude simpler than the code it's writing, and the skills you need to review said code.
I have a spreadsheet now of people I can't be fucked with.
What about 'machines' with hands and human-level cognition?
That said, this goal might itself be a non-goal. AI is going to be — or already is — more powerful than any individual human in many ways. But what my intuition points to is that humans will still have plenty of interesting work to do, like the author's example of handwriting code: it shifts from being scalable value creation into a form of craftsmanship.
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.
Maybe it's just that the capability is bad. Adtech, for example, isn't something that anyone uses for good. They blow a lot of smoke about it--looking at you, Apple--but despite the "good-washing" it's all just the same extractive, invasive, dehumanizing business. Bad people will naturally concentrate around this capability. I know because I've worked with a few of them.
AI coding tools seem like they're engineered to undermine cautious, rigorous, and pragmatic engineering discipline. Of course the bosses want that, they see a short term path to massive output increases and nothing sounds better. They'll be cashed out by the time the mess needs to be cleaned up, that's someone else's problem. People who are predisposed to this kind of antisocial behavior are the ones who concentrate around AI tools. Rigorous, careful engineers who care about building maintainable systems that will outlast their tenure find less value in them.
I think it's more nuanced than
> Technology is how we expand human capability.
I think as a general statement about technology as a whole it's true. But do all technologies expand human capabilities? I don't think so.
Advertising tech and AI coding tools are applications of technology stacks that could have been used to create what you and I might agree to be "better" tools. I don't need to tell you why ad tech got created instead of something that is a net societal benefit.
At the same time, I would say that, yes, those applications do indeed expand human capabilities. The important nuance here is whose capability, and to what end.
All I am saying is that opting out of this, in whatever form that takes, hands your agency over to those who would use it to enrich themselves at the cost of others. I sincerely feel that decades of this type of capitulation is exactly how we got to where we are today.
Unlike weapons of mass destruction, though, there's nothing to be gained by working on adtech. Let me unpack that a bit--a "good guy" can justify working on nuclear weapons because if he doesn't his country will be unable to defend itself when the treaties break down. There's no similar existential threat with adtech. If I choose to not work on that poison, I'm not leaving any advantage on the table. My agency in this situation is worthless. At least that conclusion is why I don't do adtech anymore.
I broadly agree with your bigger point though. To the extent that AI coding tools are useful it's important to explore their use, and evaluate whether they're any good. But if I'm in a company that's forcing their use, or putting up token use leaderboards, or any of the other horror stories we've been hearing about, you can be damn sure I'd get myself fired or quit. At that point the inmates are running the asylum, and there's no reason to stay.
It also is a great example of why AI has such a PR problem among normal people.
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.
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.
I’d also hope, though, that as humans, we can recognize that tools do not exist in a vacuum, and that their effect on ourselves and society at large can be net negative even if they have a net positive effect on our work (whether due to something fundamental to the tool or due to the way it is being applied at scale). We can’t responsibly leave these discussions out of our analysis of the tool itself and its fitness for purpose, because we are members of society, and our adoption/use of the tool helps to determine that societal impact.
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.