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  kragen
  This doesn't seem like a well-thought-out post. I mean, I probably could have told you that from the fact that it's either pro-AI or anti-AI (in this case the latter), but this is a particularly poorly thought out post. Others here have pointed out the water-wasting red herring, but there are several other pieces of nonsense here — the general environmental doom-mongering, and labeling recursive self-improvement as "mystical", for example.Me, I pointed Claude Opus 5 at a C codebase I've been working on for years and it immediately found five serious bugs and told me how to fix them, as well as how to use Linux system calls I wasn't familiar with to solve some other problems. And I gave it a new language for PEGs I'd written up a couple of years ago, and it wrote me a working implementation in OCaml that afternoon, fixing several bugs in my example grammars along the way and resolving a conceptual problem I'd had a roadblock on. I asked Fable 5.1 to implement a minimal proof assistant, and it wrote a clone of J-Bob in Python, which I'm studying now. Although there is a certain firehose quality to this stuff, I sure don't intend to use AI to actively de-skill my brain.That doesn't guarantee that AI will be a beneficial innovation overall, of course! As with most innovations, it probably depends on the balance between people being able to use the innovation to gain control over their own lives, and people being able to use it to gain control over others' lives. (Barring a FOOM scenario, of course, where our prediction ability is nonexistent.)So, I don't think a pro-AI post can be well thought out, either. It's too early and chaotic to understand what's going to happen, and it may actually be uncertain. Pro and anti are both far too simplistic.
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  BadBadJellyBean
  I feel this post. I am tired of "directing" agents when in reality it feels more like trying to herd a group of toddlers.Sure they can mostly write better code than a toddler but this constant nudging and reminding and reiterating and stopping them from using the token budget of the whole company for a one off script. It gets tiring and I feel like I am losing brain power while doing it. Maybe it's faster but explosive diarrhea is also a faster way to produce shit.
• 0xBA5ED
  For decades, experienced developers have been aware of the amazing things you can make that only work on your machine. Now a new demographic is becoming aware of this and they're excited. Can't blame them.
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  grebc
  I’ve had a pet theory for a long time that society loses it’s collective mind every 10ish years or so, usually starting with a good reason, but the outcome is mass stupidity followed by mass forgetting leading to a new cycle. War on terror, GFC, crypto, covid, now AI. Although the cycle does seem to be shortening.Also we’re just so damn stupid to learn from history, or even just people 10 years older than us, that we repeat the cycle.And there I guess is where saying a new sucker is born every minute is from.
• sandinmyjoints
  > human resources are still a zero-sum game, and every individual feeling super busy in their agentic silo doing a thousand things at once does not, in the end, help solve the kinds of projects that require cross-functional collaboration and team work.This rings true.
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  bucket2015
  It's interesting how there's an increasing split of software engineers into those who're very happy with AI and leaning more into it, and those who're increasingly skeptical or dejected.I don't know how this will play out, but I haven't seen anything like this before.
• runjake
  I saw this post in my RSS feeds early this morning. The post was so poorly thought out, pessimistic, and full of anti-AI myths that I unsubscribed from this blog's RSS feed. I'm surprised to see it make the front page of Hacker News.
• JMiao
  I am using safari on an older ipad and initially thought this website was an art project. The screen was black with an unlabeled toggle button. Tapping the toggle made everything visible. A dark mode bug, I guess. The intrigue was mild yet odd.
• Ancalagon
  > Spending upwards of 75% of my time directly or indirectly dealing with AI every day has absolutely robbed me of most of my enjoyment of my work. Most days feel like that Twilight Zone where you wake up and you're the same, but everyone else is different.Oh my god this nails my experience to a T.
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  3pm
  I think there were always two camps when it came to writing code, a strong bimodal distribution. People that care about the perceived code quality (aka the ‘craft’) and people who treat the code as a means to an end. At least I always felt this tension. And there is always an exception, and a person can shift between two camps during the same day. But would generally lean towards one. I know I do. And one is not better than the other, they could both be very smart and well meaning. And you need both for success in a for-profit business. It’s been discussed ad nauseam but one particular metaphor I like is Jesus Christ vs James Bond. James Bond would win most of the time. Most people tend to think like James Bond, and if they don’t, the organization strongly nudges them in this direction, promotions get decided and it becomes self reinforcing.Now a new powerful tool shows up and I think it is time for the Jesus Christ camp to throw in the towel.
• carlosjobim
  If you're surrounded by fools, or maniacs, or any other adjective you don't like, then that's your clue to change environment and the people you surround yourself with.Most of the times it's really just that. Entire nations of people can go nuts or went nuts before you were born. People will never change, so go where better people are instead of banging your head against the wall.
• frereubu
  > half of the people you interact with have turned into meat proxiesSamuel Butler presaged this in Erewhon (1872) : "May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? An affectionate machine-tickling aphid?"
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  camillomiller
  Completely off topic, but I'm absolutely fascinated by the fact that this blog's central column is built as a... <table> Good old times. Definitely not vibe coded, though.
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  tptacek
  If you think vulnerability research simply doesn't matter, you have a lot of company in that opinion. It's something Bruce Schneier used to argue, and Marcus Ranum, and a bunch of other people that used be on closed secret vulnerability-sharing mailing lists before Bugtraq blew those cliques up. These are very old arguments.But if you do think vulnerability research matters, and you're trying to argue that frontier models aren't a seismic change for that discipline, you have almost no company. Vulnerability researchers are overwhelmingly leaning on automation to find vulnerabilities and, just as importantly, generate the tooling required to test hypotheses.You can feel about that however you want to feel about it. I mostly don't care, except: you can watch people like this being negatively polarized back into the bad old days of the mid-1990s, content-free CERT advisories, and vendor-controlled "responsible disclosure" by a use case that frontier models unimpeachably excel at.
• daishi55
  > And yet, despite having found literally thousands of new vulnerabilities (only a fraction of which were reported to Open Source projects, by the way), I don't think that we're any safer than before.I’m not sure I follow. There are dozens of zero day, full RCE/privilege escalation linux vulnerabilities that have been found and fixed due to the use of LLMs. Some of which existed for decades. Unclear how that doesn’t make us safer than before.
• lucianmarin
  Printing press was bad. Usenet was bad. Google was bad. AI is bad too. Robots? They will kill us.
• sbinnee
  I cannot say that I agree to all the issues in the post. But men I am sick of meat proxies too.
• tonymet
  were we building fabulous software beforehand? It was clumsy, buggy, expensive, demanding, oppressive, cluttered.AI , trained on that garbage , is producing what now? Supposedly clumsy , buggy and so on.The lack of self awareness is just hilarious.
• vatsachak
  Sorry but this is kind of a cope post
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  micromacrofoot
  I agree that everyone's lost their minds, but so has this guy.LLMs are actually producing a lot of pretty good stuff, can debug things that would have taken an entire team a week, and the people running AI companies are also generally like the most boring supervillains imaginable. All true.It is also completely screwing up the global economy, and most people barely understand what it is and what's happening.It's also not going to collapse anytime soon as a technology despite what the economy does, and it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Everyone who's extreme on it on either end is generally wrong.
• righthand
  Artificial Unintelligence
• uwagar
  there must be a trope by now for article titles sounding interesting yet scratch the surface and its only about AI.
• jongjong
  I've been coding for 22 years, 14 years professionally, so I appreciate AI coding.It was annoying before when I had a very clear idea of what I wanted and yet it still took a whole week to implement.Now, with AI coding, I can implement any decent sized feature, exactly how I want, in a few hours and it's all polished and ready, all edge cases handled.Everything it's generating looks almost exactly like what I would have written, just written faster.Personally, I feel avenged by AI because I had been saying for years that you don't really need static typing once you reach a certain level, getting types right isn't the most difficult problem and isn't a significant source of bugs. Everyone was gaslighting me about this... Yet now everyone can verify themselves because AI has reached this level I was speaking of.Now anyone who coded with a frontier model on both TypeScript and JavaScript can see that it makes no difference at all. I can't remember ever seeing Claude mistake the type of a variable with either language... And TBH, I find Vanilla JavaScript from AI to be more succinct, not over-engineered like Typescript. Which is a point I'd been trying to make for years about incentives and actual patterns of usage (as opposed to theoretical benefits).
• mschuster91
  > So no, I'm not going to set ethics aside and then actively offer myself up as tribute to self-amputate my brain. I'm sorry if everybody else can't get rid of the brain slugs, but at this point I'm just looking to get off this ride.Same. I quit, aside from two contracts I'll serve until they run out, I'll be studying Electrical Engineering. Even if AI takes over that space... good luck constructing a robot with the dexterity required to pull cables.To anyone in IT... go and study for some qualification in tasks not easily doable for a machine. The trades are going to be a goldmine especially with all the boomers retiring. Or buy some ranch in the midst of nowhere and farm artisanal chickens, cattle or goats.(For legal reasons, the latter was a joke. Farming is extremely risky, requires a lot of upfront cash, a lot of what used to be generational knowledge, but it seems to attract a lot of IT people, especially for whatever reason the goat farming)
• redlimetea
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• enraged_camel
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  scarmig
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• anon
  undefined
• augment_me
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  monster_truck
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• boxed
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  drbscl
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• Rover222
  whine whine whine, typical.It's a great time to be alive. Everyone is infected with pessimism.
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  daedrdev
  AI does not use much water. If you believe it does, like this article does, you have fallen for propaganda and lies, ironic in a post calling everyone using AI stupid.The main cause of water fear mongering is that one woman’s well was dirty during construction of a data center. First construction is not the center running, and having lived on a well they get dirty for all kinds of reasons.
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  SuperV1234
  The title is exactly how I feel about people like you. It feels like you haven't even bothered trying using any LLMs after GPT-2.
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  S-E-P
  This is someone's vent post.
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  AIiscoming
  "That's because finding vulnerabilities has never been the bottleneck in information security."Thats just not true.
• anon
  undefined