[HN Gopher] An Overwhelmingly Negative and Demoralizing Force
___________________________________________________________________
An Overwhelmingly Negative and Demoralizing Force
Author : Doches
Score : 224 points
Date : 2025-04-08 09:22 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aftermath.site)
(TXT) w3m dump (aftermath.site)
| terminalbraid wrote:
| This story just makes me sad for the developers. I think
| especially for games you need a level of creativity that AI won't
| give you, especially once you get past the "basic engine
| boilerplate". That's not to say it can't help you, but this "all
| in" method just looks forced and painful. Some of the best games
| I've played were far more "this is the game I wanted to play"
| with a lot of vision, execution, polish, and careful
| craftspersonship.
|
| I can only hope endeavors (experiments?) like this extreme fail
| fast and we learn from it.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Asset flips (half arsed rubbish made with store bought assets)
| were a big problem in the games industry not so long ago.
| They're less prevalent now because gamers instinctively avoid
| such titles. I'm sure they'll wise up to generative slop too,
| I've personally seen enough examples to get a general feel for
| it. Not fun, derivative, soulless, buggy as hell.
| hnthrow90348765 wrote:
| But make some shallow games with generic, cell-shaded anime
| waifus accessed by gambling and they eat that shit up
| ang_cire wrote:
| If someone bothered to make deep, innovative games with
| cell-shaded anime waifus without gambling, they'd likely
| switch. This is more likely a market problem of US game
| companies not supplying sufficient CSAWs (acronym feels
| unfortunate but somehow appropriate).
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Your dismissive characterization is not really accurate.
| Even in the cell-shaded anime waifu genre, there is a
| spectrum of gameplay quality and gamers do gravitate toward
| and reward the better games. The big reason MiHoYo games
| (Genshin Impact, Star Rail) have such a big presence and
| staying power is that even though they are waifu games at
| the core, the gameplay is surprisingly good (they're a
| night-and-day difference compared to slop like Blue
| Archive), and they're still fun even if you resolve to
| never pay any microtransactions.
| dkobia wrote:
| I've been wrestling with this tension between embracing AI tools
| and preserving human expertise in my work. On one hand, I have
| experienced real genuine productivity gains with LLMs - they help
| me code, organize thoughts and offer useful perspectives I hadn't
| even considered. On the other, I realize managers often don't
| understand the nature of creative work which is trivialized by
| all the content generation tools.
|
| Creativity emerges through a messy exploration and human
| experience -- but it seems no one has time for that these days.
| Managers have found a shiny new tool to do more with less. Also,
| AI companies are deliberately targeting executives with promises
| of cost-cutting and efficiency. Someone has to pay for all the
| R&D.
| 3D30497420 wrote:
| I had very similar thoughts while reading through the article.
| I also have found some real value in LLMs, and when used well,
| I think can and will be quite beneficial.
|
| Notably, a good number the examples were just straight-up bad
| management, irrespective of the tools being used. I also think
| some of these reactions are people realizing that they work for
| managers or in businesses that ultimately don't really care
| about the quality of their work, just that it delivers monetary
| value at the end.
| throwawayfgyb wrote:
| I really like AI. It allows me to complete my $JOB tasks faster,
| so I have more time for my passion projects, that I craft
| lovingly and without crappy AI.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I have never had a job where completing tasks faster wound up
| with me having more personal free time. It always just means
| you move on to the next task more quickly
| esafak wrote:
| Perhaps the OP completes the assigned task ahead of schedule
| and keeps the saved time.
| htek wrote:
| Shhh! Do you want to kill AI? All the C-suite and middle
| management need to hear is that "My QoL has never been
| better since I could use AI at work! Now I can 'quiet quit'
| half the day away! I can see my family after hours! Or even
| have a second job!"
| floriannn wrote:
| This is a fair bit easier as a remote worker, but even in-
| office you would just sandbag your time rather than
| publishing the finished work immediately. In-office it's more
| likely that you would waste time on the internet rather than
| working on a personal project though.
| dominicrose wrote:
| That's not the worst thing. Having more work means you're
| less bored. You probably won't be payed more though. But
| being too productive can cause you to have no next task, wich
| isn't the same thing as having free time.
|
| I think that's part of the reason why devs like working from
| home and not be spied on.
| adrian_b wrote:
| "AI" is just a trick to circumvent the copyright laws that are
| the main brake in writing quickly programs.
|
| The "AI" generated code is just code extracted from various
| sources used for training, which could not be used by a human
| programmer because most likely they would have copyrights
| incompatible with the product for which "AI" is used.
|
| All my life I could have written much faster any commercial
| software if I had been free to just copy and paste any random
| code lines coming from open-source libraries and applications,
| from proprietary programs written for former employers or from
| various programs written by myself as side projects with my own
| resources and in my own time, but whose copyrights I am not
| willing to donate to my current employer, so that I would no
| longer be able to use in the future my own programs.
|
| I could search and find suitable source code for any current
| task as fast and with much greater reliability than by
| prompting an AI application. I am just not permitted to do that
| by the existing laws, unlike the AI companies.
|
| Already many decades ago, it was claimed that the solution for
| enhancing programmer productivity is more "code reuse". However
| "code reuse" has never happened at the scale imagined in the
| distant past, but not because of technical reasons, but due to
| the copyright laws, whose purpose is exactly to prevent code
| reuse.
|
| Now "AI" appears to be the magical solution that can provide
| "code reuse" at the scale dreamed a half of century ago, by
| escaping from the copyright constraints.
|
| When writing a program for my personal use, I would never use
| an AI assistant, because it cannot accelerate my work in any
| way. For boilerplate code, I use various templates and very
| smart editor auto-completion, there is no need of any "AI" for
| that.
|
| On the other hand, when writing a proprietary program,
| especially for some employer that has stupid copyright rules,
| e.g. not allowing the use of libraries with different
| copyrights, even when those copyrights are compatible with the
| requirements of the product, then I would not hesitate to
| prompt an AI assistant, in order to get code stripped of
| copyright, saving thus time over rewriting an equivalent code
| just for the purpose of enabling it to be copyrighted by the
| employer.
| popularonion wrote:
| Not sure why this is downvoted. People forget or weren't
| around for the early 2000s when companies were absolutely
| preoccupied with code copyright and terrified of lawsuits.
| That loosened up only slightly during the
| GitHub/StackOverflow era.
|
| If you proposed something like GitHub Copilot to any company
| in 2020, the legal department would've nuked you from orbit.
| Now it's ok because "everyone is doing it and we can't be
| left behind".
|
| Edit: I just realized this was a driver for why whiteboard
| puzzles became so big - the ideal employee for MSFT/FB/Google
| etc was someone who could spit out library quality,
| copyright-unencumbered, "clean room" code without access to
| an internet connection. That is what companies had to
| optimize for.
| int_19h wrote:
| It's downvoted because it's plainly incorrect.
| bflesch wrote:
| This is an extremely important point, and first time I see it
| mentioned with regards to software copyright. Remember the
| days where companies got sued for including GPL'd code in
| their proprietary products?
| voidUpdate wrote:
| I wish I had a job where if I completed all my work quickly, I
| was allowed to do whatever
| ang_cire wrote:
| How do they know if you're done, if you haven't "turned it
| in" yet? They're probably not watching your screen
| constantly.
|
| My last boss told me essentially (paraphrasing), "I budget
| time for your tasks. If you finish late, I look like I
| underestimate time required, or you're not up to it. If you
| finish early, I look like I overestimate. If I give you a
| week to do something, I don't care if you finish in 5
| minutes, don't give it to me until the week is up unless you
| want something else to do."
| justonceokay wrote:
| I've always been the kind of developer that aims to have more red
| lines than green ones in my diffs. I like writing libraries so we
| can create hundreds of integration tests declaratively. I'm the
| kind of developer that disappears for two days and comes back
| with a 10x speedup because I found two loop variables that should
| be switched.
|
| There is no place for me in this environment. I'd not that I
| couldn't use the tools to make so much code, it's that AI use
| makes the metric for success speed-to-production. The solution to
| bad code is more code. AI will never produce a deletion. Publish
| or perish has come for us and it's sad. It makes me feel old just
| like my Python programming made the mainframe people feel old. I
| wonder what will make the AI developers feel old...
| pja wrote:
| > _Unseen were all the sleepless nights we experienced from
| untested sql queries and regexes and misconfigurations he had
| pushed in his effort to look good. It always came back to a
| lack of testing edge cases and an eagerness to ship._
|
| If you do this you are creating a rod for your own back: You
| need management to see the failures & the time it takes to fix
| them, otherwise they will assume everything is fine & wonderful
| with their new toy & proceed with their plan to inflict it on
| everyone, oblivious to the true costs + benefits.
| lovich wrote:
| >If you do this you are creating a rod for your own back: You
| need management to see the failures & the time it takes to
| fix them, otherwise they will assume everything is fine &
| wonderful with their new toy & proceed with their plan to
| inflict it on everyone, oblivious to the true costs +
| benefits.
|
| If at every company I work for, my manager's average 7-8
| months in their role as _my_ manager, and I am switching jobs
| every 2-3 years because companies would rather rehire their
| entire staff than give out raises that are even a portion of
| the market growth, why would I care?
|
| Not that the market is currently in that state, but that's
| how a large portion of tech companies were operating for the
| past decade. Long term consequences don't matter because
| there are no longer term relationships.
| NortySpock wrote:
| I think there will still be room for "debugging AI slop-code"
| and "performance-turning AI slop-code" and "cranking up the
| strictness of the linter (or type-checker for dynamically-typed
| languages) to chase out silly bugs" , not to mention the need
| for better languages / runtime that give better guarantees
| about correctness.
|
| It's the front-end of the hype cycle. The tech-debt problems
| will come home to roost in a year or two.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > I think there will still be room for "debugging AI slop-
| code" and "performance-turning AI slop-code"
|
| Ah yes, maintenance, the most fun and satisfying part of the
| job. /s
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Congrats, you've been promoted to be the cost center. And
| sloppers will get to the top by cranking out features you
| will need to maintain.
| popularonion wrote:
| > slopper
|
| new 2025 slang just dropped
| unraveller wrote:
| You work in the slop mines now.
| philistine wrote:
| > AI will never produce a deletion.
|
| That, right here, is a world-shaking statement. Bravo.
| QuadrupleA wrote:
| Not quite true though - I've occasionally passed a codebase
| to DeepSeek to have it simplify, and it does a decent job.
| Can even "code golf" if you ask it.
|
| But the sentiment is true, by default current LLMs produce
| verbose, overcomplicated code
| esafak wrote:
| Today's assistants can refactor, which includes deletions.
| furyofantares wrote:
| They can do something that looks a lot like refactoring but
| they suck extremely hard at it, if it's of any considerable
| size at all.
| Eliezer wrote:
| And if it isn't already false it will be false in 6 months,
| or 1.5 years on the outside. AI is a moving target, and the
| oldest people among you might remember a time in the 1750s
| when it didn't talk to you about code at all.
| Taterr wrote:
| It can absolutely be used to refactor and reduce code, simply
| asking "Can this be simplified" in reference to a file or
| system often results in a nice refactor.
|
| However I wouldn't say refactoring is as hands free as
| letting AI produce the code in the first place, you need to
| cherry pick its best ideas and guide it a little bit more.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| You have to go lower down the stack. Don't use AI but write the
| AI. For the foreseeable future there is a lot of opportunity to
| make the AI faster.
|
| I am sure assembly programmers were horrified at the code the
| first C compilers produced. And I personally am horrified by
| the inefficiency of python compared to the C++ code I used to
| write. We always have traded faster development for
| inefficiency.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| C solved the horrible machine code problem by inflicting
| programmers with the concept of undefined behavior, where
| blunt instruments called optimizers take a machete to your
| code. There's a very expensive document locked up somewhere
| in the ISO vault that tells you what you can and can't write
| in C, and if you break any of those rules the compiler is
| free to write whatever it wants.
|
| This created a league of incredibly elitist[0] programmers
| who, having mastered what they thought was the rules of C,
| insisted to everyone else that the real problem was you not
| understanding C, not the fact that C had made itself a
| nightmare to program in. C is bad soil to plant a project in
| even if you know where the poison is and how to avoid it.
|
| The inefficiency of Python[1] is downstream of a trauma
| response to C and all the many, many ways to shoot yourself
| in the foot with it. Garbage collection and bytecode are
| tithes paid to absolve oneself of the sins of C. It's not a
| matter of Python being "faster to write, harder to execute"
| as much as Python being used as a defense mechanism.
|
| In contrast, the trade-off from AI is unclear, aside from the
| fact that you didn't spend time writing it, and thus aren't
| learning anything from it. It's one thing to sacrifice
| performance for stability; versus sacrificing efficiency and
| understanding for faster code churn. I don't think the latter
| is a good tradeoff! That's how we got under-baked and
| developer-hostile ecosystems like C to begin with!
|
| [0] The opposite of a "DEI hire" is an "APE hire", where APE
| stands for "Assimilation, Poverty & Exclusion"
|
| [1] I'm using Python as a stand-in for any memory-safe
| programming language that makes use of a bytecode interpreter
| that manipulates runtime-managed memory objects.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Why was bytecode needed to absolve ourselves of the sins of
| C?
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| C was specifically designed to map 1:1 onto PDP-11 assembly.
| For example, the '++' operator was created solely to
| represent auto-increment instructions like TST (R0)+.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| The AI companies probably use Python because all the
| computation happens on the GPU and changing Python control
| plane code is faster than changing C/C++ control plane code
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| If the company values that 10x speedup, there is absolutely
| still a place for you in this environment. Only now it's going
| to take five days instead of two, because it's going to be
| harder to track that down in the less-well-structured stuff
| that AI produces.
| Leynos wrote:
| Why are you letting the AI construct poorly structured code?
| You should be discussing an architectural plan with it first
| and only signing off on the code design when you are
| comfortable with it.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I wonder what the impact of LLM codegen will have on open
| source projects like Kubernetes and Linux.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I haven't really seen what Linus thinks of LLMs but I'm
| curious
|
| I suspect he is pretty unimpressed by the code that LLMs
| produce given his history with code he thinks is subpar, but
| what do I know
| fifilura wrote:
| Not really.
|
| https://blog.mathieuacher.com/LinusTorvaldsLLM/
| ajjenkins wrote:
| AI can definitely produce a deletion. In fact, I commonly use
| AI to do this. Copy some code and prompt the AI to make the
| code simpler or more concise. The output will usually be fewer
| lines of code.
|
| Unless you meant that AI won't remove entire features from the
| code. But AI can do that too if you prompt it to. I think the
| bigger issue is that companies don't put enough value on
| removing things and only focus on adding new features. That's
| not a problem with AI though.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I messed around with Copilot for a while and this is one of
| the things that actually really impressed me. It was very
| good at taking a messy block of code, and simplifying it by
| removing unnecessary stuff, sometimes reducing it to a one
| line lambda. Very helpful!
| buggy6257 wrote:
| > sometimes reducing it to a one line lambda.
|
| Please don't do this :) Readable code is better than clever
| code!
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Especially "clever" code that is AI generated!
|
| At least with human-written clever code you can trust
| that somebody understood it at one point but the idea of
| trusting AI generated code that is "clever" makes my skin
| crawl
| throwaway889900 wrote:
| Sometimes a lambda is more readable. "lambda x : x if x
| else 1" is pretty understandable and doesn't need to be
| it's own separately defined function.
|
| I should also note that development style also depends on
| tools, so if your IDE makes inline functions more
| readable in it's display, it's fine to use concisely
| defined lambdas.
|
| Readablity is a personal preference thing at some point
| after all.
| gopher_space wrote:
| My cleverest one-liners will block me when I come back to
| them unless I write a few paragraphs of explanation as
| well.
| Freedom2 wrote:
| I'm no big fan of LLM generated code, but the fact that GP
| bluntly states "AI will never produce a deletion" despite
| this being categorically false makes it hard to take the rest
| of their spiel in good faith.
|
| As a side note, I've had coworkers disappear for N days too
| and in that time the requirements changed (as is our
| business) and their lack of communication meant that their
| work was incompatible with the new requirements. So just
| because someone achieves a 10x speedup in a vacuum also isn't
| necessarily always a good thing.
| fifilura wrote:
| I'd also also be wary of the risk of being an architecture-
| astronaut.
|
| A declarative framework for testing may make sense in some
| cases, but in many cases it will just be a complicated way
| of scripting something you use once or twice. And when you
| use it you need to call up the maintainer anyway when you
| get lost in the yaml.
|
| Which of course feels good for the maintainer, to feel
| needed.
| specialist wrote:
| This is probably just me projecting...
|
| u/justonceokay's wrote:
|
| > _The solution to bad code is more code._
|
| This has always been true, in all domains.
|
| Gen-AI's contribution is further automating the production of
| "slop". Bots arguing with other bots, perpetuating the
| vicious cycle of bullshit jobs (David Graeber) and
| enshitification (Cory Docotrow).
|
| u/justonceokay's wrote:
|
| > _AI will never produce a deletion._
|
| I acknowledge your example of tidying up some code. What Bill
| Joy may have characterized as "working in the small".
|
| But what of novelty, craft, innovation? Can Gen-AI, moot the
| need for code? Like the oft-cited example of -2,000 LOC?
| https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
|
| Can Gen-AI do the (traditional, pre 2000s) role of quality
| assurance? Identify unnecessary or unneeded work? Tie
| functionality back to requirements? Verify the goal has been
| satisfied?
|
| Not yet, for sure. But I guess it's conceivable, provided
| sufficient training data. Is there sufficient training data?
|
| You wrote:
|
| > _only focus on adding new features_
|
| Yup.
|
| Further, somewhere in the transition from shipping CDs to
| publishing services, I went from developing products to just
| doing IT & data processing.
|
| The code I write today (in anger) has a shorter shelf-life,
| creates much less value, is barely even worth the bother of
| creation much less validation.
|
| Gen-AI can absolutely do all this @!#!$hit IT and data
| processing monkey motion.
| gopher_space wrote:
| > Can Gen-AI, moot the need for code?
|
| During interviews one of my go-to examples of problem
| solving is a project I was able to kill during discovery,
| cancelling a client contract and sending everyone back to
| the drawing board.
|
| Half of the people I've talked to do not understand why
| that might be a positive situation for everyone involved. I
| need to explain the benefit of having clients think you
| walk on water. They're still upset my example isn't heavy
| on any of the math they've memorized.
|
| It feels like we're wondering how _wise_ an AI can be in an
| era where wisdom and long-term thinking aren 't really
| valued.
| stuckinhell wrote:
| AI can do deletions and refactors, and 10x speedups. You just
| need to push the latest models constantly.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >AI use makes the metric for success speed-to-production
|
| Wasn't it like that always for most companies? Get to market
| fast, add features fast, sell them, add more features?
| 762236 wrote:
| AI writes my unit tests. I clean them up a bit to ensure I've
| gone over every line of code. But it is nice to speed through
| the boring parts, and without bringing declarative constructs
| into play (imperative coding is how most of us think).
| nilkn wrote:
| I don't have much sympathy for this. This country has long
| expected millions and millions of blue collar workers to accept
| and embrace change or lose their careers and retirements. When
| those people resisted, they were left to rot. Now I'm reading a
| sob story about someone throwing a fit because they refuse to
| learn to use ChatGPT and Claude and the CEO had to sit them down
| and hold their hand in a way. Out of all the skillset transitions
| that history has required or imposed, this is one of the easiest
| ever.
|
| They weren't fired; they weren't laid off; they weren't
| reassigned or demoted; they got attention and assistance from the
| CEO and guidance on what they needed to do to change and adapt
| while keeping their job and paycheck at the same time, with
| otherwise no disruption to their life at all for now.
|
| Prosperity and wealth do not come for free. You are not owed
| anything. The world is not going to give you special treatment or
| handle you with care because you view yourself as an artisan.
| Those are rewards for people who keep up, not for those who
| resist change. It's always been that way. Just because you've so
| far been on the receiving end of prosperity doesn't mean you're
| owed that kind of easy life forever. Nobody else gets that kind
| of guarantee -- why should you?
|
| The bottom line is the people in this article will be learning
| new skills one way or another. The only question is whether those
| are skills that adapt their existing career for an evolving world
| or whether those are skills that enable them to transition
| completely out of development and into a different sector
| entirely.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > These are rewards for people who keep up, not for those who
| resist change.
|
| lol. I work with LLM outputs all day -- like it's my job to
| make the LLM do things -- and I probably speak to some LLM to
| answer a question for me between 10 and 100 times a day.
| They're kinda helpful for some programming tasks, but pretty
| bad at others. Any company that tried to mandate me to use an
| LLM would get kicked to the curb. That's not because I'm "not
| keeping up", it's because they're simply not good enough to put
| more work through.
| ewzimm wrote:
| Wouldn't this depend a lot on how management responds to your
| use? For example, if you just kept a log of prompts and
| outputs with notes about why the output wasn't acceptable,
| that could be considered productive use in this early stage
| of LLMs, especially if management's goal was to have you
| learning how to use LLMs. Learning how not to use something
| is just as important in the process of adapting any new tool.
|
| If management is convinced of the benefits of LLMs and the
| workers are all just refusing to use them, the main problem
| seems to be a dysfunctional working environment. It's
| ultimately management's responsibility to work that out, but
| if the management isn't completely incompetent, people tasked
| with using them could do a lot to help the situation by
| testing and providing constructive feedback rather than
| making a stand by refusing to try and providing grand
| narratives about damaging the artistic integrity of something
| that has been commoditized from inception like video game
| art. I'm not saying that video game art can't be art, but it
| has existed in a commercial crunch culture since the 1970s.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| If you're not doing the work, you're not learning from the
| result.
|
| The CEOs in question bought what they believed to be a power
| tool, but got what is more like a smarter copy machine. To be
| clear, copy machines are not useless, but they also aren't
| going to drive the 200% increases in productivity that people
| think they will.
|
| But because management demands the 200% increase in
| productivity they were promised by the AI tools, all the
| artists and programmers on the team hear "stop doing anything
| interesting or novel, just copy what already exists". To be
| blunt, that's not the shit they signed up for, and it's going
| to result in a far worse product. Nobody wants slop.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| I teach compilers, systems, etc. at a university. Innumerable
| times I have seen AI lead a poor student down a completely
| incorrect but plausible path that will still compile.
|
| I'm adding `.noai` files to all the project going forward:
|
| https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/disable-ai-assistant.htm...
|
| AI may be somewhat useful for experienced devs but it is a
| catastrophe for inexperienced developers.
|
| "That's OK, we only hire experienced developers."
|
| Yes, and where do you suppose experienced developers come from?
|
| Again and again in this AI arc I'm reminded of the magicians
| apprentice scene from fantasia.
| robinhoode wrote:
| > Yes, and where do you suppose experienced developers come
| from?
|
| Almost every time I hear this argument, I realize that people
| are not actually complaining about AI, but about how modern
| capitalism is going to use AI.
|
| Don't get me wrong, it will take huge social upheaval to
| replace the current economic system.
|
| But at least it's an honest assessment -- criticizing the
| humans that are using AI to replace workers, instead of
| criticizing AI itself -- even if you fear biting the hands that
| feed you.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| i don't think it's an either/or situation
| bayindirh wrote:
| Actually, there are two main problems with AI:
| 1. How it's gonna be used and how it'll be a detriment to
| quality and knowledge. 2. How AI models are trained
| with a great disregard to consent, ethics, and licenses.
|
| The technology itself, the idea, what it can do is not the
| problem, but how it's made and how it's _gonna_ be used will
| be a great problem going forward, and _none of the suppliers_
| tell that it should be used in moderation and will be harmful
| in the long run. Plus the same producers are ready to crush
| /distort anything to get their way.
|
| ... smells very similar to tobacco/soda industry. Both
| created faux-research institutes to further their causes.
| EFreethought wrote:
| I would say the huge environmental cost is a third problem.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Yeah, that's true.
| clown_strike wrote:
| > How AI models are trained with a great disregard to
| consent, ethics, and licenses.
|
| You must be joking. Consumer models' primary source of
| training data seems to be the legal preambles from BDSM
| manuals.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > Almost every time I hear this argument, I realize that
| people are not actually complaining about AI, but about how
| modern capitalism is going to use AI.
|
| This was pretty consistently my and many others viewpoint
| since 2023. We were assured many times over that this time it
| would be different. I found this unconvincing.
| rchaud wrote:
| > I realize that people are not actually complaining about
| AI, but about how modern capitalism is going to use AI.
|
| Something very similar can be said about the issue of guns in
| America. We live in a profoundly sick society where the
| airwaves fill our ears with fear, envy and hatred. The easy
| availability of guns might not have been a problem if it
| didn't intersect with a zero-sum economy.
|
| Couple that with the unavailability of community and social
| supports and you have a a recipe for disaster.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > criticizing the humans that are using AI to replace
| workers, instead of criticizing AI itself
|
| I think you misunderstand OP's point. An employer saying "we
| only hire experienced developers [therefore worries about
| inexperienced developers being misled by AI are unlikely to
| manifest]" doesn't seem to realize that the AI is what makes
| inexperienced developers. In particular, using the AI to
| learn the craft will not allow prospective developers to
| learn the fundamentals that will help them understand when
| the AI is being unhelpful.
|
| It's not so much to do with roles currently being performed
| by humans instead being performed by AI. It's that the
| experienced humans (engineers, doctors, lawyers, researchers,
| etc.) who can benefit the most from AI will eventually retire
| and the inexperienced humans who don't benefit much from AI
| will be shit outta luck because the adults in the room didn't
| think they'd need an actual education.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| > Yes, and where do you suppose experienced developers come
| from?
|
| Strictly speaking, you don't even need university courses to
| get experienced devs.
|
| There will always be individuals that enjoy coding and do so
| without any formal teaching. People like that will always be
| more effective at their job once employed, simply because
| they'll have just that much more experience from trying various
| stuff.
|
| Not to discredit University degrees of course - the best devs
| will have gotten formal teaching and code in their free time.
| erikerikson wrote:
| GP didn't mention university degrees.
|
| You get experienced devs from inexperienced devs that get
| experience.
|
| [edit: added "degrees" as intended. University _was_
| mentioned as the context of their observation]
| ffsm8 wrote:
| The first sentence contextualized the comment to university
| degrees as far as I'm concerned. I'm not sure how you could
| interpret it any other way, but maybe you can enlighten me.
| erikerikson wrote:
| I read it as this is the context from which I make the
| following observation. It's not excluding degrees but
| certainly not requiring them.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > People like that will always be more effective at their job
| once employed
|
| This is honestly not my experience with self taught
| programmers. They can produce excellent code in a vacuum but
| they often lack a ton of foundational stuff
|
| In a past job, I had to untangle a massive nested loop
| structure written by a self taught dev, which did work but
| ran extremely slowly
|
| He was very confused and asked me to explain why my code ran
| fast, his ran slow, because "it was the same number of loops"
|
| I tried to explain Big O, linear versus exponential
| complexity, etc, but he really didn't get it
|
| But the company was very impressed by him and considered him
| our "rockstar" because he produced high volumes of code very
| quickly
| taosx wrote:
| I was self taught before I studied, most of the
| "foundational" knowledge is very easy to acquire. I've
| mentored some self-taught juniors and they surprised me at
| how fast they picked up concepts like big O just by looking
| at a few examples.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Big O was just an anecdote for example
|
| My point is you don't know what you don't know. There is
| really only so far you can get by just noodling around on
| your own, at some point we have to learn from more
| experienced people to get to the next level
|
| School is a much more consistent path to gain that
| knowledge than just diving in
|
| It's not the only path, but it turns out that people like
| consistency
| abbadadda wrote:
| I would like a book recommendation for the things I don't
| know please (Sarcasm but seriously)...
|
| A senior dev mentioned a "class invariant" the other day
| And I just had no idea what that was because I've never
| been exposed to it... So I suppose the question I have is
| what should I be exposed to in order to know that? What
| else is there that I need to learn about software
| engineering that I don't know that is similarly going to
| be embarrassing on the job if I don't know it? I've got
| books like cracking the coding interview and software
| engineering at Google... But I am missing a huge gap
| because I was unable to finish my masters and computer
| science :-(
| ffsm8 wrote:
| I literally said as much?
|
| > _Not to discredit University degrees of course - the best
| devs will have gotten formal teaching and code in their
| free time._
| Arainach wrote:
| The disagreement is over the highlighted line:
|
| >People like that will always be more effective at their
| job once employed
|
| My experience is that "self taught" people are passionate
| about solving the parts they consider fun but do not have
| the breadth to be as effective as most people who have
| formal training but less passion. The previous poster
| also called out real issues with this kind of developer
| (not understanding time complexity or how to fix things)
| that I have repeatedly seen in practice.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| But the sentence is about people coding in their free
| time vs not doing so... If you take an issue with that,
| you argue that self taught people that don't code in
| their free time are better at coding the the people that
| do - or people with formal training that don't code in
| their free time being better at it vs people that have
| formal training and do...
|
| I just pointed out that removing classes entirely would
| still get you experiences people. Even if they'd likely
| be better if they code and get formal training. I stated
| that _very_ plainly
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > I stated that very plainly
|
| You actually didn't state it very plainly at all. Your
| initial post is contradictory, look at these two
| statements side by side
|
| > There will always be individuals that enjoy coding and
| do so without any formal teaching. People like that will
| always be more effective at their job once employed
|
| > the best devs will have gotten formal teaching and code
| in their free time
|
| People who enjoy coding without formal training -> more
| effective
|
| People who enjoy coding and have formal training -> best
| devs
|
| Anyways I get what you were trying to say, now. You just
| did not do a very good job of saying it imo. Sorry for
| the misunderstanding
| Izkata wrote:
| I read this one:
|
| > There will always be individuals that enjoy coding and
| do so without any formal teaching. People like that will
| always be more effective at their job once employed
|
| As "people who enjoy coding and didn't need formal
| training to get started". It includes both people who
| have and don't have formal training.
|
| Both statements together are (enthusiasm + formal) >
| (enthusiasm without formal) > (formal without
| enthusiasm).
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Sure that's a valid interpretation but it wasn't how I
| read it
|
| > Both statements together are (enthusiasm + formal) >
| (enthusiasm without formal) > (formal without
| enthusiasm).
|
| I don't think the last category (formal education without
| enthusiasm) really exists, I think it is a bit of a
| strawman being held up by people who are *~passionate~*
|
| I suspect that without any enthusiasm, people will not
| make it through any kind of formal education program, in
| reality
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Uh, almost nobody I've worked with to date codes in their
| free time with any kind of regularity.
|
| If you've never encountered the average 9-5 dev that just
| does the least amount of effort they can get away with,
| then I have to apploud the HR departments of the
| companies you've worked for. Whatever they're doing,
| they're doing splendid work.
|
| And almost all of my coworkers are university grads that
| do literally the same you've used as an example for non
| formally taught people: they write abysmally performing
| code because they often have an unreasonable fixation on
| practices like inversion of control (as a random
| example).
|
| As a particularly hilarious example I've had to explain
| to such a developer that an includes check on a large
| list in a dynamic language such as JS performs abysmally
| philistine wrote:
| > There will always be individuals that enjoy coding and do
| so without any formal teaching.
|
| We're talking about the industry responsible for ALL the
| growth of the largest economy in the history of the world.
| It's not the 1970s anymore. You can't just count on weirdos
| in basements to build an industry.
| dingnuts wrote:
| I'm so glad I learned to program so I could either be
| called a basement dweller or a tech bro
| philistine wrote:
| I mean, a garage dweller works just as well.
| voidhorse wrote:
| I think the software industry will look just like the material
| goods space post-industrialization after the dust settles:
|
| Large corporations will use AI to deliver low-quality software at
| high speed and high scale.
|
| "Artisan" developers will continue to exist, but in much smaller
| numbers and they will mostly make a living by producing refined,
| high-quality custom software at a premium or on creative
| marketplaces. Think Etsy for software.
|
| That's the world we are heading for, unless/until companies
| decide LLMs are ultimately not cost beneficial or overzealous use
| of them leads to a real hallucination induced catastrophe.
| GarnetFloride wrote:
| Sounds like fast fashion. The thinnest, cheapest fabric,
| slapped together as fast as possible with the least amount of
| stitching. Shipped fast and obsolete fast.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Fast fashion - also ruinous to the environment.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Management: "devs aren't paid to play with shiny new tech, they
| should be shipping features!"
|
| Also management: "I need you to play with AI and try to find a
| use for it"
| rchaud wrote:
| > "I have no idea how he ended up as an art director when he
| can't visualise what he wants in his head unless can see some end
| results", Bradley says. Rather than beginning with sketches and
| ideas, then iterating on those to produce a more finalised image
| or vision, Bradley says his boss will just keep prompting an AI
| for images until he finds one he likes, and then the art team
| will have to backwards engineer the whole thing to make it work.
|
| Sounds like an "idea guy" rather than an art director or
| designer. I would do this exact same thing, but on royalty-free
| image websites, trying to get the right background or explanatory
| graphic for my finance powerpoints. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft now
| has AI "generating" such images for you, but it's much slower
| than what I could do flipping through those image sites.
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| It would be an understatement to call this a skewed perspective.
| In most of the anecdotes they seem to try really hard to
| trivialize the productive benefits of AI, which is difficult to
| take seriously. The case that LLMs create flawed outputs or are
| limited in what they can do is not controversial at all, but by
| and large, reports by experienced developers is that it has
| improved their productivity, and it's now part of their workflow.
| Whether businesses and hire-ups try to use it in absurd ways is
| neither here nor there. That, and culture issues, were a problem
| before AI.
|
| Obviously some workers have a strong incentive to oppose
| adoption, because it may jeopardize their careers. Even if the
| capabilities are over-stated it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy
| as higher-ups choices may go. Union shops will try to stall it,
| but it's here to stay. You're in a globally competitive market.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I have very little objection to AI, providing we get UBI to
| mitigate the fallout.
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| Right, well even without AGI (no two people agree on whether
| it's coming within 5 years, 30, or 100), finely-tuned LLMs
| can disrupt the economy fast if the bottlenecks get taken
| care of. The big one is the robot-economy. This is popularly
| placed further off in timescales, but it does not require AGI
| at all. We already have humanoid robots on the market for the
| price of a small car, they're just dumb. Once we scale up
| solar and battery production, and then manufacturing, it's
| coming for menial labor jobs. They already have all the
| pieces, it's a foregone conclusion. What we don't know how to
| do is to create a real "intelligence", and here the
| evangelists will wax about the algorithms and the nature of
| intelligence, but at the end of the day it takes more than
| scaling up an LLM to constitute an AGI. The bet is that AI-
| assisted research will lead to breakthrough in a trivial
| amount of time.
|
| With white-collar jobs the threat of AI feels more abstract
| and localized, and you still get talk about "creating new
| jobs", but when robots start coming off the assembly line
| people will demand UBI so fast it will make your head spin.
| Either that or they'll try to set fire to them or block them
| with unions, etc. Hard to say when because another effort
| like the CHIPS act could expedite things.
| dingnuts wrote:
| Humanoid robots on the market for the price of a small car?
| That's complete science fiction. There have been demos of
| such robots but only demos.
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| > Humanoid robots on the market for the price of a small
| car? That's complete science fiction.
|
| Goldman Sachs doesn't think so.
|
| https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/humanoid-robots-
| mark...
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/humanoid-robot-market-
| researc...
|
| https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-
| reports/robotics...
|
| They don't even need to be humanoid is the thing.
| stuckinhell wrote:
| 16k humanoid robots https://www.unitree.com/g1/
| Izkata wrote:
| And 1X has apparently been testing theirs in home
| environments for months, though it looks like they're not
| for sale yet:
| https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/21/norways-1x-is-building-
| a-h...
| stuckinhell wrote:
| https://www.unitree.com/g1/ 16k humanoid robot
| namaria wrote:
| Do they do anything or are they an expensive toy in the
| shape of a humanoid robot?
| parpfish wrote:
| I was thinking about this and realized that if we want an AI
| boom to lead to UBI, AI needs to start replacing the cushy
| white collar jobs first.
|
| If you start by replacing menial labor, there will be more
| unemployment but you're not going to build the political will
| to do anything because those jobs were seen as "less than"
| and the political class will talk about how good and
| efficient it is that these jobs are gone.
|
| You need to start by automating away "good jobs" that
| directly affect middle/upper class people. Jobs where people
| have extensive training and/or a "calling" to the field. Once
| lawyers, software engineers, doctors, executives, etc get
| smacked with widespread unemployment, the political class
| will take UBI much more seriously.
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| Incidentally it seems to be happening in that order, but
| laborers won't have a long respite (if you can call it
| that)
| parpfish wrote:
| i think that the factor determining which jobs get
| usurped by AI first isn't going to be based on the
| cognitive difficulty as much as it is about robotic
| difficulty and interaction with the physical world.
|
| if you job consists of reading from a computer ->
| thinking -> entering things back into a computer, you're
| on the top of the list because you don't need to set up a
| bunch of new sensors and actuators. In other words... the
| easier it is to do your job remotely, the more likely it
| is you'll get automated away
| waveringana wrote:
| needing a lawyer and needing a doctor are very common cases
| of bankruptcy in the US. both feel very primed to be
| replaced by models
| stuckinhell wrote:
| I suspect elites will build a two-tiered AI system where
| only a select few get access to the cutting-edge stuff,
| while the rest of us get stuck with the leftovers.
|
| They'll use their clout--money, lobbying, and media
| influence--to lock in their advantage and keep decision-
| making within their circle.
|
| In the end, this setup would just widen the gap, cementing
| power imbalances as AI continues to reshape everything. UBI
| will become the bare minimum to keep the masses sedated.
| hello_computer wrote:
| But why will that happen? If they have robots and AI and all
| the money, what's stopping the powers that be from disposing
| of the excess biomass?
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| What's there to gain? What do they care about biomass?
| They're still in the business of selling products, until
| the economy explodes. I find this to be circular because
| you could say the same thing about right now, "why don't
| they dispose of the welfare class" etc.
|
| There's also the fact that "they" aren't all one and the
| same persons with the exact same worldview and interests.
| hello_computer wrote:
| The Davos class was highly concerned about ecology before
| Davos was even a thing. In America, their minions (the
| "coastie" class) are coming to see the liquidation of the
| kulaks as perhaps not such a bad thing. If it devolves
| into a "let them eat cake" scenario, one has to wonder
| how things will play out in "proles vs robot pinkertons".
| Watch what the sonic crowd control trucks did in Serbia
| last week.
|
| Of course there is always the issue of "demand"--of
| keeping the factories humming, but when you are worth
| billions, your immediate subordinates are worth hundreds
| of millions, and all of their subordinates are worth a
| few million, maybe you come to a point where "lebensraum"
| becomes more valuable to you than another zero at the end
| of your balance?
|
| When AI replaces the nerds (in progress), they become
| excess biomass. Not talking about a retarded hollywood-
| style apocalypse. Economic uncertainty is more than
| enough to suppress breeding in many populations. " _not
| with a bang, but a whimper_ "
|
| If you know any of "them", you will know that "they" went
| to the same elite prep schools, live in the same cities,
| intermarry, etc. The "equality" nonsense is just a lie to
| numb the proles. In 2025 we have a full-blown hereditary
| nobility.
|
| edit: answer to ianfeust6:
|
| The West is not The World. There are over a billion
| Chinese, Indians, Africans...
|
| Words mean things. Who said tree hugger? If you are an
| apex predator living in an increasingly cloudy tank,
| there is an obvious solution to the cloudyness.
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| So your take is that the wealthiest class will purge
| people because they're tree-huggers. Not the worst
| galaxy-brained thing I've heard before, but still
| laughable.
|
| Don't forget fertility rate is basically stagnant in the
| West and falling globally, so this seems like a waste of
| time considering most people just won't breed at all.
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| also: emissions will continue to drop
| hello_computer wrote:
| there has been far more degradation to the natural
| environment than mere air pollution. general sherman
| decimated the plains indians with a memorandum. do you
| think that you are sufficiently better and sufficiently
| more indispensable than a plains indian?
| hello_computer wrote:
| _repeated for thread continuity_ :
|
| The West is not The World. There are over a billion
| Chinese, Indians, Africans...
|
| Words mean things. Who said tree hugger? If you are an
| apex predator living in an increasingly cloudy tank,
| there is an obvious solution to the cloudyness.
| hello_computer wrote:
| It's karma. The creatives weren't terribly concerned when the
| factory guys lost their jobs. " _Lern to code!_ " Now it's our
| turn to " _Learn to OnlyFans_ " or " _Learn to Homeless_ "
| Fraterkes wrote:
| "learn to code" was thrown around by programmers, not
| creatives. Everyone else (including writers and artists) has
| long hated that phrase, and condemded it as stupid and
| shortsighted.
| hello_computer wrote:
| "learn to code" was from the media. whether they deserve to
| be classified as "creatives" i will leave to the
| philosophers.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > The creatives [...] "Lern to code!"
|
| No, the underlying format of "$LABOR_ISSUE can be solved by
| $CHANGE_JOB" comes from a place of _politics_ , where a
| politician is trying to suggest they _have a plan_ to somehow
| tackle a painful problem among their constituents, and that
| therefore they should be (re-)elected.
|
| Then the politicians piled onto "coal-miners can learn to
| code" etc. because it was uniquely attractive, since:
|
| 1. No big capital expenditures, so they don't need to
| promise/explain how a new factory will get built.
|
| 2. The potential for remote work means constituents wouldn't
| need to sell their homes or move.
|
| 3. Participants wouldn't require multiple years of expensive
| formal schooling.
|
| 4. It had some "more money than you make now" appeal.
| hello_computer wrote:
| Stating it in patronizing fact-checker tone does not make
| it true. The tech nerds started it ( _they love cheap labor
| pools_ ). Then the politicians joined their masters'
| bandwagon. It was a PR blitz. Who has the money for those?
| Dorseys, Grahams, & Zuckerbergs, or petty-millionaire
| mayors & congressmen? Politicians are just the house slaves
| --servants of money.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learn_to_Code#Codecademy_and_
| C...
| Fraterkes wrote:
| If ai exacerbates culture issues and management incompetence
| then that is an inherent downside of ai.
|
| There is a bunch of programmers who like ai, but as the article
| shows, programmers are not the only people subjected to ai in
| the workplace. If you're an artist, you've taken a job that has
| crap pay and stability for the amount of training you put in,
| and the only reason you do it is because you like the actual
| content of the job (physically making art). There is obviously
| no upside to ai for those people, and this focus on the
| managers' or developers' perspective is myopic.
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| It's an interesting point that passion-jobs that creatives
| take on (including game dev) tend to get paid less, and where
| the thrilling component is disrupted there could be less
| incentive to bother entering the field.
|
| I think for the most part creatives will still line up for
| these gigs, because they care about contributing to the end
| products, not the amount of time they spend using Blender.
| Fraterkes wrote:
| You are again just thinking from the perspective of a
| manager: Yes, if these ai jobs need to be filled, artists
| will be the people filling them. But from the artists
| perspective there are fewer jobs, and the jobs that do
| remain are less fulfilling. So: from the perspective of a
| large part of the workforce it is completely true and
| rational to say that ai at their job has mostly downsides.
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| > from the artists perspective there are fewer jobs, and
| the jobs that do remain are less fulfilling.
|
| Re-read what I wrote. You repeated what I said.
|
| > So: from the perspective of a large part of the
| workforce it is completely true and rational to say that
| ai at their job has mostly downsides.
|
| For them, maybe.
| Fraterkes wrote:
| Alright, so doesn't that validate a lot of the feelings
| and opinions layed out in the OP? Have I broadened your
| worldview?
| andybak wrote:
| It might seem hard to believe but there are a bunch of
| artists who also like AI. People whose artistic practice
| predates AI. The definition of "artist" is a quagmire which I
| won't get into but I am not stretching the definition here in
| any way.
| Fraterkes wrote:
| I'm sure there are a bunch! I'm an artist, I talk to a
| bunch of artists physically and online. It's not the
| prevailing opinion in my experience.
| andybak wrote:
| Agreed. But it's important to counter the impression that
| many have that it's nearly unanimous.
| hbsbsbsndk wrote:
| Software developers are so aware of "enshittification" and yet
| also bullish about this generation of AI, it's baffling.
|
| It's very clear the "value" of the LLM generation is to churn out
| low-cost, low-quality garbage. We already outsourced stuff to
| Fivrr but now we can cut people out altogether. Producing
| "content" nobody wants.
| kstrauser wrote:
| There are many, many reasons to be skeptical of AI. There are
| also excellent tasks it can efficiently help with.
|
| I wrote a project where I'd initially hardcoded a menu hierarchy
| into its Rust. I wanted to pull that out into a config file so it
| could be altered, localized, etc without users having it and
| recompile the source. I opened a "menu.yaml" file, typed the name
| of the top-level menu, paused for a moment to sip coffee, and Zed
| popped up a suggested completion of the file which was
| syntactically correct and perfect for use as-is.
|
| I honestly expected I'd spend an hour mechanically translating
| Rust to YAML and debugging the mistakes. It actually took about
| 10 seconds.
|
| It's also been freaking brilliant for writing docstrings
| explaining what the code I just manually wrote does.
|
| I don't want to use AI to write my code, any more than I'd want
| it to solve my crossword. I sure like having it help with the
| repetitive gruntwork and boilerplate.
| Jyaif wrote:
| "He doesn't know that the important thing isn't just the end
| result, it's the journey and the questions you answer along the
| way"
|
| This is satire right?
| 000ooo000 wrote:
| Can't wait to hear the inevitable slurs people will create to
| refer to heavy AI users and staunch AI avoiders.
| esafak wrote:
| Prompt puncher and Luddite come to mind.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| "Sloppers" appeared in another thread in this post. I've seen
| it before, I think it'll stick.
| esafak wrote:
| Companies need to be aware of the long-term affects of relying on
| AI. It causes atrophy and, when it introduces a bug, it takes
| more time to understand and fix than if you had written it
| yourself.
|
| I just spent a week fixing a concurrency bug in generated code.
| Yes, there were tests; I uncovered the bug when I realized the
| test was incorrect...
|
| My strong advice, is to digest every line of generated code;
| don't let it run ahead of you.
| dkobia wrote:
| It is absolutely terrifying to watch tools like Cursor generate
| so much code. Maybe not a great analogy, but it feels like
| driving with Tesla FSD in New Delhi in the middle of rush hour.
| If you let it run ahead of you, the amount of code to review
| will be overwhelming. I've also encountered situations where it
| is unable to pass tests for code it wrote.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Like TikTok AI Coding breaks human psychology. It is
| engrained in us that if we have a tool that looks right
| enough and highly productive we will over-apply it to our
| work. Even diligent programmers will be lured to accepting
| giant commits without diligent review and they will pay for
| it.
|
| Of course yeeting bad code into production with a poor review
| process is already a thing. But this will scale that bad code
| as now you have developers who will have grown up on it.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| When have companies ever cared about the long-term effects of
| _anything_ , and why would they suddenly start now?
| DeathArrow wrote:
| If a manager thinks paying $20 monthly for an AI tool will make a
| developer or artist 5x more productive, he's delusional.
|
| On the other hand, AI can be useful and can accelerate _a bit_
| some work.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| A very bad programmer can program some cool stuff with the help
| of libraries, toolkits, frameworks and engines that they barely
| understand. I think that's pretty cool and makes things otherwise
| impossible possible, but it doesn't make the very bad programmer
| better than they really are.
|
| I believe AI is a variation of this, except a library at least
| has a _license_.
| matt3210 wrote:
| The AI code has thousands of licenses but the legal system
| hasn't caught up
| woah wrote:
| Why so much hand-wringing? If you are an anti-AI developer and
| you are able to develop better code faster than someone using AI,
| good for you. If AI-using developers will end up ruining their
| codebase in months like many here are saying, then things will
| take care of themselves.
| svantana wrote:
| I see two main problems with this approach:
|
| 1. productivity and quality is hard to measure
|
| 2. the codebase they are ruining is the same one I am working
| on.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Faster is not a smart metric to judge a programmer by.
|
| "more code faster" is not a good thing, it has never been a
| good thing
|
| I'm not worried about pro AI workers ruining _their_ codebases
| at their jobs
|
| I'm worried about pro AI coworkers ruining _my_ job by shitting
| up the codebases I have to work in
| woah wrote:
| I said "better code faster". Delivering features to users is
| always a good thing, and in fact is the entire point of what
| we do.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > in fact is the entire point of what we do
|
| Pump the brakes there
|
| You may have bought into some PMs idea of what we do, but
| I'm not buying it
|
| As professional, employed software developers, the entire
| point of what we do is to provide value to our employers.
|
| That isn't always by delivering features to users, it's
| certainly not always by delivering features _faster_
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Even if you say "better faster" tens times fast, the
| quality of being produced fast and being broadly good are
| very different. Speed of development can be measured
| immediately. Quality is holistic. It's a product of not
| just formatting clear structures but of relating to the
| rest of a given system.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| A lot of modern software dev is focused on delivering
| features to shareholders, not users. Doing that faster is
| going to make my life, as a user, worse.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I've posted recently about a dichotomy which I have had in my
| head for years as a technical person: there are two kinds of
| tools; the first lets you do the right thing more easily and
| the second lets you do the wrong thing more quickly and for
| longer before you have to pay for it. AI/LLMs can definitely be
| the latter kind of tool, especially in a context where short
| term incentives swamp long term ones.
| int_19h wrote:
| I'm actually pro-AI and I use AI assistants for coding, but I'm
| also very concerned that the way those things will be deployed
| at scale in practice is likely to lead to severe degradation of
| software quality across the board.
|
| Why the hand-wringing? Well, for one thing, as a developer I
| still have to work on that code, fix the bugs in it, maintain
| it etc. You could say that this is a positive since AI slop
| would provide for endless job security for people who know how
| to clean up after it - and it's true, it does, but it's a very
| tedious and boring job.
|
| But I'm not just a developer, either - I'm also a user, and
| thinking about how low the average software quality already is
| today, the prospect of it getting even worse across the board
| is very unpleasant.
|
| And as for things taking care of themselves, I don't think they
| will. So long as companies can still ship _something_ , it's
| "good enough", and cost-cutting will justify everything else.
| That's just how our economy works these days.
| ang_cire wrote:
| This assumes a level of both rationality and omniscience that
| don't exist in the real world.
|
| If a company fails to compete in the market and dies, there is
| no "autopsy" that goes in and realizes that it failed because
| of a chain-reaction of factors stemming from bad AI-slop code.
| And execs are so far removed from the code level, they don't
| know either, and their next company will do the same thing.
|
| What you're likely to end up with is project managers and
| developers who _do_ know the AI code sucks, and they 'll be
| heeded by execs just as much they are now, which is to say not
| at all.
|
| And when the bad AI-code-using devs apply to the next business
| whose execs are pro-AI because they're clueless, guess who
| they'll hire?
| matt3210 wrote:
| One thing jumps out about the person who noticed the AI was wrong
| on things they were familiar with. It's like when ELon Musk talks
| about rockets. I don't know about rockets so I take his word for
| it. When Elon Must talked about software it was obvious he has no
| idea what he's doing. So when the AI generates something I know
| nothing about, it looks productive but when it's generating
| things for which I'm familiar I know its full of shit.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > So when the AI generates something I know nothing about, it
| looks productive but when it's generating things for which I'm
| familiar I know its full of shit.
|
| This is why when you hear people talk about how great it is at
| producing X, our takeaway should be "this person is not an
| expert at X, and their opinions can be disregarded"
|
| They are telling on themselves that they are not experts at the
| thing they think the AI is doing a great job at
| andybak wrote:
| "This is why when you hear people talk about how terrible it
| is at producing X, our takeaway should be "this person either
| hasn't tried to use it in good faith, and their opinions can
| be disregarded"
|
| I'm playing devil's advocate somewhat here but it often seem
| like that there's a bunch of people on both sides using hella
| motivated reasoning because they have very strong _feelings_
| that developed early on in their exposure to AI.
|
| AI is both terrible and wonderful. It's useless and some
| things and impressive at others. It will ruin whole sectors
| of the economy and upturn lives. It will get better and it is
| getting better so any limitations you currently observe are
| probably termporary. The net benefit for humanity may turn
| out to be positive or negative - it's too early to tell.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > AI is both terrible and wonderful. It's useless and some
| things and impressive at others
|
| That's kind of my problem. I am saying that it mostly only
| _appears_ impressive to people who don 't know better
|
| When people do know better it comes up short consistently
|
| Most of the pro AI people I see are bullish about it on
| things they have no idea about, like non-technical CEOs
| insisting that it can create good code
| andybak wrote:
| > When people do know better it comes up short
| consistently
|
| I disagree with that part and I don't think this opinion
| can be sustained by anyone using it with any regularity
| _in good faith_
|
| People can argue whether it's 70/30 or 30/70 or what
| domains it's more useful in than others but you are
| overstating the negative.
| int_19h wrote:
| Have you considered that it's actually impressive in some
| areas that are outside of your interest or concern?
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Could be, but why would I trust that when it's clearly so
| bad at the things I am good at?
| ang_cire wrote:
| > The net benefit for humanity may turn out to be positive
| or negative - it's too early to tell.
|
| It's just a tool, but it is unfortunately a tool that is
| currently dominated by large-sized corporations, to serve
| Capitalism. So it's definitely going to be a net-negative.
|
| Contrast that to something like 3D printing, which has most
| visibly benefited small companies and individual users.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Sounds like the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
| some-guy wrote:
| I always assumed game development would be one of the most
| impacted by AI hype, for better or worse. With game development
| there's a much higher threshold for subjectivity and
| "incorrectness".
|
| I'm in a Fortune 500 software company and we are also being
| pushed AI down our throats, even though so far it has only been
| useful for small development tasks. However our tolerance for
| incorrectness is much, much lower--and many skip levels are
| already realizing this.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I'm an indie game developer and its a domain where I find AI to
| be most useless - too much of what a game is interactive,
| spatial, and about game-feel. The AI just can't do it. Even
| GPT's latest models really struggled to write reasonable 3d
| transformations, which is unsurprising, since they live in text
| world, not 3d world.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| I wish our company forced AI on us. Our security is so tight,
| it's pretty much impossible to use any good LLMs.
| ang_cire wrote:
| It really doesn't take that beefy of a machine to run a good
| LLM locally instead of paying some SaaS company to do it for
| you.
|
| I've got a refurb homelab server off PCSP with 512gb ram for
| <$1k, and I run decently good LLM models (Deepseek-r1:70b,
| llama3.3:70b). Given your username, you might even try pitching
| a GPU server to them as dual-purpose; LLM + hashcat. :)
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > "He doesn't know that the important thing isn't just the end
| result, it's the journey and the questions you answer along the
| way". Bradley says that the studio's management have become so
| enamoured with the technology that without a reliance on AI-
| generated imagery for presentations and pitches they would not be
| at the stage they are now, which is dealing with publishers and
| investors.
|
| Take out the word AI and replace it with any other tool that's
| over-hyped or over-used, and the above statement will apply to
| any organization.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| When LLMs came out I suppressed my inner curmudgeon and dove in,
| since the technology was interesting to me and seemed much more
| likely than crypto to be useful beyond crime. Thus, I have used
| LLMs extensively for many years now and I have found that despite
| the hype and amazing progress, they still basically only excel
| first drafts and simple refactorings (where they are, I have to
| say, incredibly useful for eliminating busy work). But I have yet
| to use a model, reasoning or otherwise, that could solve a
| problem that required genuine thought, usually in the form of
| constructing the right abstraction, bottom up style. LLMs write
| code like super-human dummies, with a tendency to put too much
| code in a given function and with very little ability to invent a
| domain in which the solution is simple and clearly expressed,
| probably because they don't care about that kind of readability
| and its not much in their data set.
|
| I'm deeply influenced by languages like Forth and Lisp, where
| that kind of bottom up code is the cultural standard and and I
| prefer it, probably because I don't have the kind of linear
| intelligence and huge memory of an LLM.
|
| For me the hardest part of using LLMs is knowing when to stop and
| think about the problem in earnest, before the AI generated code
| gets out of my human brain's capacity to encompass. If you think
| a bit about how AI still is limited to text as its white board
| and local memory, text which it generates linearly from top to
| bottom, even reasoning, it sort of becomes clear why it would
| struggle with _genuine_ abstraction over problems. I 'm no longer
| so naive as to say it won't happen one day, even soon, but so far
| its not there.
| caseyy wrote:
| There is a small, hopeful flipside to this. While people using AI
| to produce art (such as concept art) have flooded the market,
| real skills now command a higher price than before.
|
| To pull this out of the games industry for just a moment, imagine
| this: you are a business and need a logo produced. Would you hire
| someone at the market price who uses AI to generate something...
| sort of on-brand they _most definitely_ cannot provide indemnity
| cover for (considering how many of these dubiously owned works
| they produce), or would you pay above the market price to have an
| artist make a logo for you that is guaranteed to be their own
| work? The answer is clear - you 'd cough up the premium. This is
| now happening on platforms like UpWork and Fiverr. The prices for
| real human work have not decreased; they have shot up
| significantly.
|
| It's also happening slowly in games. The concept artists who are
| skilled command a higher salary than those who rely on AI. If you
| depend on image-generating AI to do your work, I don't think many
| game industry companies would hire you. Only the start-ups that
| lack experience in game production, perhaps. But that part of the
| industry has always existed - the one made of dreamy projects
| with no prospect of being produced. It's not worth paying much
| attention to, except if you're an investor. In which case,
| obviously it's a bad investment.
|
| Besides, just as machine-translated game localization isn't
| accepted by any serious publisher (because it is awful and can
| cause real reputational damage), I doubt any evident AI art would
| be allowed into the final game. Every single piece of that will
| need to be produced by humans for the foreseeable future.
|
| If AI truly can produce games or many of their components, these
| games will form the baseline quality of cheap game groups on the
| marketplaces, just like in the logo example above. The buyer will
| pay a premium for a quality, human product. Well, at least until
| AI can meaningfully surpass humans in creativity - the models we
| have now can only mimic and there isn't a clear way to make them
| surpass.
| gdulli wrote:
| > There is a small, hopeful flipside to this. While people
| using AI to produce art (such as concept art) have flooded the
| market, real skills now command a higher price than before.
|
| It's "hopeful" that the future of all culture will resemble
| food, where the majority have access to McDonalds type slop
| while the rich enjoy artisan culture?
| caseyy wrote:
| It's hopeful because AI has not devalued creative human labor
| but increased its worth. Similar to how if one were a skilled
| chef, they didn't start working for McDonald's when it came
| to be, but for a restaurant that pays significantly above
| McDonald's.
|
| Most people's purchasing power being reduced is a separate
| matter, more related to the eroding middle class and
| greedflation. Many things can be said about it, but they are
| less related to the trend I highlighted. Even if, supposing
| the middle class erosion continues, the scenario you suggest
| may very well play out.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| > real skills now command a higher price than before.
|
| Only if companies value/recognize those real skills over that
| of the alternative, and even if they do, companies are pretty
| notorious for choosing whatever is cheapest/easiest (or
| perceived to be).
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| This article is an example of why the gender-neutral use of
| pronouns makes things a pain to read. If you're already changing
| the interviewees' names then IDK why you couldn't just pick an
| arbitrary he/she pronoun to stick to for one character.
|
| > Francis says their understanding of the AI-pusher's outlook is
| that they see the entire game-making process as a problem, one
| that AI tech companies alone think they can solve. This is a
| sentiment they do not agree with.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| There's nothing painful about this to anyone who hasn't been
| conscripted into the culture wars.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| But it was the culture war that resulted in this change to
| the language. Previous to the war, singular 'they' was to be
| avoided due to the ambiguity it introduces.
| spacecadet wrote:
| What ambiguity? We know it's a human, the human has a name.
| We do not know their gender or sex, both are not relevant.
| They works perfectly.
|
| This seems like a you problem...
| gwbas1c wrote:
| "they" was a gender-neutral pronoun when I was in school in the
| 1990s.
| ryoshoe wrote:
| Singular they was used by respected authors even as far back
| as the 19th century.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| It has been considered normal in some colloquial uses for a
| long time. But until the late 2010s/early 2020s all style
| guides considered it to be poor form due to the ambiguity and
| muddy sentence structure it creates. Recommendations were
| changed recently for political reasons.
| spacecadet wrote:
| Shit changes. You can either let it roll off you or over
| you. Alot less painful rolling off.
| caseyy wrote:
| AI is the latest "overwhelmingly negative" games industry fad,
| affecting game developers. It's one of many. Most are because
| nine out of ten companies make games for the wrong reason. They
| don't make them as interactive art, as something the developers
| would like to play, or to perfect the craft. They make them to
| make publishers and businessmen rich.
|
| That business model hasn't been going so well in recent years[0],
| and it's already been proclaimed dead in some corners of the
| industry[1]. Many industry legends have started their own studios
| (H. Kojima, J. Solomon, R. Colantonio, ...), producing games for
| the right reasons. When these games are inevitably mainstream
| hits, that will be the inflection point where the old industry
| will significantly decline. Or that's what I think, anwyay.
|
| [0] https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tJdLsQzfWg
| more_corn wrote:
| Everyone I know uses it to some degree. Simply having a smart
| debugger does wonders. You don't have to give up control, it can
| help you stay in flow state. Or it can constantly irritate you if
| you fight it.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I would think that, if AI-generated content is inferior, these
| games will fail in the marketplace.
|
| So, where are the games with AI-generated content? Where are the
| reviews that praise or pan them?
|
| (Remember, AI is a tool. Tools take time to learn, and sometimes,
| the tool isn't worth using.)
| akomtu wrote:
| Corporations don't need human workers, they need machines, the
| proverbial cogs that lack their own will and implement the will
| of the corporation instead. AI will make it happen: human workers
| will be managed by AI with sub-second precision and kill whatever
| little creativity and humanity the workers still had.
| specialist wrote:
| Each example's endeavor is the production of culture. The least
| interesting use case for "AI".
|
| Real wealth creation will come from other domains. These new
| tools (big data, ML, LLMs, etc) unlock the ability to tackle
| entirely new problems.
|
| But as a fad, "AI" is pretty good for separating investors from
| their money.
|
| It's also great for further beating down wages.
| Animats wrote:
| AI-generated art just keeps getting better. This looks like a
| losing battle.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| A.i. is a blatant case of darwinism.
|
| There are those who adapt, those who will keep moaning about it
| and finally those who believe it can do everything.
|
| First one will succeed, second one will be replaced, third one is
| going to get hurt.
|
| I believe this article and the people it mentions are mostly from
| the second category. Yet no one with all his mind can deny that
| ai makes writing code faster, not necessarily better but faster,
| and games at the end are mostly codes.
|
| Of course ai is going to get pushed hard by your ceo, he knows
| that if he doesn't, another competitor who use it will be able to
| produce more games, faster and less expensive.
| ohgr wrote:
| So on that basis you think the market is happy with shit things
| made very fast?
|
| I can assure you it's not. And people are starting to realise
| that there is a lot of shit. And know that LLMs generate it.
| ang_cire wrote:
| > another competitor who use it will be able to produce more
| games, faster and less expensive
|
| And yet this is no guarantee they will succeed. In fact, the
| largest franchises and games tend to be the ones that take
| their time and build for quality. There are a thousand GTA
| knock-offs on Steam, but it's R* that rakes in the money.
| DadBase wrote:
| I've been doing "vibe coding" since Borland C++. We used to align
| the mood of the program with ambient ANSI art in the comments. if
| the compiler crashed, that meant the tone was off.
| gukov wrote:
| Shopify CEO: "AI usage is now a baseline expectation"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43613079
| crvdgc wrote:
| A perspective from a friend, who recently gave up trying to get
| into concept art:
|
| Before AI, there was out-sourcing. With mass-produced cheap
| works, foreign studios eliminated most junior positions.
|
| Now AI is just taking this trend to its logical extreme: out-
| sourcing to machines, the ultimate form of out-sourcing. The cost
| approaches to 0 and the quantity approaches to infinity.
| jongjong wrote:
| > In terms of software quality, I would say the code created by
| the AI was worse than code written by a human-though not
| drastically so-and was difficult to work with since most of it
| hadn't been written by the people whose job it was to oversee it.
|
| This is a key insight. The other insight is that devs spend most
| of their time reading and debugging code, not writing it. AI
| speeds up the writing of code but slows down debugging... AI was
| trained with buggy code because most code out there is buggy.
|
| TBH, I don't think there exists enough non-buggy code out there
| to train an AI to write good code which doesn't need to be
| debugged so much.
|
| When AI is trained on normal language, averaging out all the
| patterns produces good results. This is because most humans are
| good at writing with that level of precision. Code is much more
| precise and the average human is not good at it. So AI was
| trained on low-quality data there.
|
| The good news for skilled developers is that there probably isn't
| enough high quality code in the public domain to solve that
| problem... And there is no incentive for skilled developers to
| open source their code.
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