Posted by goostavos 2 days ago
I mean, I loved Human Resource Machine but not so much 7 billion humans (as the programming got repetitive).
3Brown1Blue recently posted an excellent video on how he's thinking about AI's impact on math, which of course is in a similar position as programming. One of the points he made was that machines' abilities to lift heavy things has no bearing on the value of exercise -- which is to say that, just because AI can now code/do math extremely well, that has no bearing on the positive effects (the "mental exercise") one gets from programming/doing math "the old way;" the same can be said about one's enjoyment.
The problem here, though, is that I used to get the enjoyment/"exercise"/upskilling/etc from the same 8 hours that paid for my life. Now, I have to squeeze that in _outside_ of those 8 hours. So AI has, very clearly and simply, reduced my downtime outside of work -- I literally have less time for non-programming hobbies and activities because of AI.
I enjoy writing complex programs because I get appreciation for my work. I don't really care that much, but I'm sure we humans love being appreciated for what we do.
It is indeed, and full disclosure, I am 100% one of these folks.
Much like there are people that still forge full-scale two-handed swords in their garage.
Magnificent and fulfilling work, but with questionable economic value.
1725 points|df07|11 years ago|854 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11348798
Obviously entrusting an entity to do everything is different from using a dependency or library, but aren’t LLMs for work just a natural progression of this? Programming is about automation. Programmers have been automating and outsourcing their work since the concept of SDKs were invented. Or even since high-level languages were invented. The industry was already doing this, and doing it excessively, long before Claude. left-pad happened a decade ago and we’ve learned nothing.
> Second, even if the package’s logic is correct, I can’t help but be amazed by the fact that developers are taking on dependencies for single line functions that they should be able to write with their eyes closed. In my opinion, if you cannot write a left-pad, is-positive-integer, or isArray function in 5 minutes flat (including the time you spend Googling), then you don’t actually know how to code. Hell, any of these would make a great code screening interview question to determine whether or not a candidate can code.
> Finally, stringing APIs together and calling it programming doesn’t make it programming. It’s some crazy form of dependency hacking that involves the cloud, over-engineering things, and complexity far beyond what’s actually needed.
Obviously LLMs make the situation even more dire, but I think people are overlooking that the industry was automating itself out of programming as a craft even before them. It's just the automation involved reuse of the work of other humans.
This isn't just "a bit more automation". It's "now we don't need lift operators".
Open source development has become buried in an avalanche of AI generated code as well so the character of a lot of hobby programming in that domain has changed drastically.
And that's OK.
Change comes to every profession, and it's never universally helpful or productive. I'm very much in the middle of the road on the AI booster/skeptic continuum, but I know it's not going away.
And getting to "enjoy" the work was always just a perk. Where in labor law in any country throughout history guarantees enjoyment of the work? Surprisingly few people throughout history have been able to say they enjoyed their work. It's always been a trade of time for money, everything else is table stakes. I'm finding new ways to find enjoyment both in the job and out of it, and if that time-for-money trade stops being worth it, I'll figure out something else.
0: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha...
Probably in 2015 or so, I think it started shifting towards a net negative -- and now, it's gone deeply and starkly into making the world a worse place.
How would you reverse this trend, I dont know, but AI basically puts us in the same boat as the doctors in that article.
If you’re a The Art of Computer Programming-reading, code golf-competing, blogging neat elegant hacks kind of programmer, were you really getting that experience coding at work?