"We never use AI. For anything." becomes a much weaker statement when you exclude dependencies. Your whole app could just be a thin wrapper around some third party dependency which leans heavily on AI.
It makes the manifested statements become more realistic, sure, as I doubt any dogmatic approach could even exist for long. But I don't think this warrants anybody to bring out the pitchforks and scream "HYPOCRISY!", though...
This whole thing is a matter of choice, and we shouldn't necessarily conflate the role we take when we consume/use a dependency/tool with the role of crafting own things. I, for one, can apply agency solely on things that offer me means to change them.
I think there's merit to it. It's not as if doing it exclusively with AI is all sunshine and rainbows. As someone doing agentic engineering at work I'm actually starting to sour on it after seeing what it's doing to people's ability to think for themselves and even do basic software engineering tasks.
“I’m not an elitist,” Green said. “It’s just that I’d much rather sculpt or write in my journal or read Proust than sit there passively staring at some phosphorescent screen.”
Off-topic, but this Onion piece is a bit weak. The hook is that the man is obnoxious about his habit of not watching TV, and that's all there is to it.
Some stuff from the Onion is genius, but this is not it.
Handcrafted software will find it's own market the same way that handcrafted clothing, furniture and other previously industrialized goods that became commodities did. They'll be more expensive generally and it'll be a smaller market overall, you'll always have some people who will love them all the same. Not my choice, but I can understand why they would want it.
The difference is that one is physical and the other digital. Digital art, even if exceptionally high quality, has been commoditized by artists from developing countries asking dumping wages, and not recovered since. People who have enough money to buy for the "soul" of an object, and the labor behind it, usually buy physical.
I agree with you but I believe the definition of handcrafted will shift to include software produced partly by AI, just as most handcrafted things involve industrial machinary at some point.
But then, I can also imagine a world where nobody cares enough about writing code and instead we have "human designed software" just as we currently have human designed cars and fridges but few made by hand (and no market for them). Then, handwritten software becomes an impressive curiosity like Chris Sawyer's original Rollercoaster Tycoon written entirely in ASM.
Etsy like situation is very possibly. Where people will simply lie about something being handcrafted to sell it at some sort of premium. And then when questioned defend it with reasoning like everyone else is doing it or it doesn't matter or it is actually superior.
> All that computing power built up under the guise of bringing about the “AI future” will start being used to spy on you, follow your every movement, listen to all your calls, and more.
This post sounds like someone who lives in deep in an echo chamber and has a warped reality because of it. That said I read this point and was like yup they’re right about one thing anyway.
As much as I want to agree with this, for some of the reasons given, even I must admit that AI does have its uses. I think a reasonable take is the ObjFW one:
> AI/LLMs cannot be used to generate any code, documentation, assets or similar – all of it needs to be 100% written by a human.
> Utilizing AI/LLMs to help find bugs in the code or to help with debugging is acceptable. However, if the AI/LLM proposes a patch, this cannot be used – the AI/LLM should be instructed to only explain bugs or fixes, but never produce any code.
> Using an AI/LLM agent to create tickets is not acceptable. However, using an AI/LLM for translation between languages in tickets is acceptable.
I'm by now past the point where I thought "this is a great tool that will help me programming" to the fear phase where I know it will destroy my job and career. But still I can't agree fully with the article. Hallucinations are not the issue. We can extract value from it even when it does hallucinate.
The only reason we're having this discussion is because AI is intelligent and therefore poses a threat to us.
To put it bluntly: this particular product category is now an afternoon's vibe-coding project for one person. The result would be worse code, probably. Also probably still good enough.
> The result would be worse code, probably. Also probably still good enough.
And that's because the definition of "good enough" is drifting towards "crappy", has been for decades, now accelerated by the AI.
Was thinking the other day how the bars of quality for software pre-Internet was so much higher just because any small software shop only ever had one shot: ship your software on floppy disks, with practically no chance to patch and fix bugs later. People either like your 1.0 or they don't and that's your whole business story.
Then came the Internet, bug fix updates became so much easier, and with it came crappification and bugs-as-a-norm attitude.
> And that's because the definition of "good enough" is drifting towards "crappy", has been for decades, now accelerated by the AI.
Interestingly I have found the opposite in the software I write. LLMs make it so easy to get the basics in place that I spend the time on the details and polish.
Nothing so scientific. Im just having a lot of fun using the software I write with LLMs because I can easily add polish and build things I didnt have time for before.
Ah yes, just want I want, slopcoded dev tools by people who don’t understand what the fuck they’re doing and who will drop support the moment their agents hit some minor issue.
I expect the energy usage of a thousand people all running their own local models is significantly less efficient than those same people sharing a model hosted in a data center.
Remember, in a consumer economy, anything that reduces the number of consumers is risky. Tech people such as developers are well-paid. Reducing their numbers will be a noticeable loss of market.
Yeah, companies might save headcount, but the cost of automation and lost customers? Given the market momentum, we’ll learn this over the next few years.
And how will debugging occur if there’s no strong grasp on the current code or purpose?
They're right about everything, but at the same time it actually has become useful.
Sensible not to depend on it and create a vibe-coded mess, but keep everything modular & review the generated code closely and you can go back to humans-only in future with no problems.
If someone offered a whole team of devs in India for an unknown number of months basically for free, one would be a fool to turn that down even knowing it wouldn't last forever. Claude etc feels like the same kinda deal.
> If someone offered a whole team of devs in India for an unknown number of months basically for free, one would be a fool to turn that down even knowing it wouldn't last forever. Claude etc feels like the same kinda deal.
I've made a lot of money fixing software where people paid for those offshore teams and they would have been better off having not done that and writing maintainable software from the start. They were fools paying for it and they still would have been fools if it had been free.
Sure, I've been part of "in-sourcing" failing projects too, but it was always a sign of management incompetence rather than anything else. It's easy to shift the blame to an outsourcer when it's been GIGO; constantly changing requirements, feature creep, no budget for maintenance, the usual stuff that kills codebases.
I think this whole piece is just a collection of lazy cliches.
- Rug pull scam
What's going to happen when the AI companies jack up prices 20x to meet API prices? 1: they won't, because they'll get their lunch eaten immediately by 2: the local models that are almost as good that you can run yourself (with a few thousand in hardware costs).
- AI is not intelligent
This doesn't matter at all, as long as it performs the task who cares? It's better that it's not intelligent because otherwise we'd be enslaving it. A plane doesn't flap its wings but it gets you somewhere - without actually "flying".
Hallucinations are also clearly way less prevalent than, say, 2023. Perhaps it's not possible to get rid of them totally, but there's much fewer.
- AI is the most successful con man in history
If this is true, won't AI-free companies soon outcompete ones that use AI? I'm afraid this is just wishful thinking. You can easily create complete garbage with AI but if you know how to code you can also be much more productive, hence why so many renowned programmers, mathematicians, creators of languages and so on use it.
- AI is killing the environment and destroying people’s lives
How could a data centre be polluting the water with rust? The power problem is true but the amount of land used by them is miniscule.
- AI will lead to a tyrannical police state
It could contribute, but we've had surveillance since long before AI. The Stasi had mass surveillance without even computers (which I would say have been much more conducive to the proliferation of surveillance).
- Nobody knows what AI even is
Then what did you just spend the rest of the page complaining about?
This quote from the post makes me sad for all the researchers and all the math and the scaling and the investing that I believe was done in good faith in pursuit of pure science and betterment for us all:
"AI is designed to make you dependent on it"
This is throwing a lot of agentic opacity bathwater and not really looking what else's in there.
A lot of these criticisms seem to be very 2023-coded.
There have been a lot of hiccups to the transition towards using AI-assisted code but, ignoring some of that sloppiness, I've enjoyed the product velocity from some of the services/apps I know that heavily use coding agents.
Reminds me the viral "lonely penguin" video from Werner Herzog's documentary Encounters at the End of the World shows a single penguin turn away from the sea and walked fatal interior mountains of Antarctica instead of staying with its group
This feels like saying you'll never use self-driving cars.
Sure, LLM effectiveness might seem debatable to some (not for me), but these things improve frequently. So saying you'll never use it, is a red flag to me and I question what other technologies and advancements you ignore.
And the human beings who use them to produce code don't produce deterministic results either. Current harnesses have come a long a way to make non determinism not be a problem for quite a few areas. And the scope keeps increasing every day.
Yet nevertheless, both e.g. syntax highlighting and intellisense have been heralded as things that "fry ur brain". So have high level programming languages by the way.
To give you a particularly specific example, Rob Pike really wants you to know that if you use syntax highlighting, he thinks of you as a child.
AI is as deterministic as a human programmer. A programmer who is burned out and has not slept well produces code of a different quality than a programmer who has slept well and is highly motivated. That's hardly deterministic. AI can be made deterministic enough if you have strict quality gates, just like with humans.
IDEs, static linters, and syntax highlighters aren't designed to replace any part of the problem solving process, but rather augment them. It's impossible to become dependent on any of these tools to the point where your cognitive skills begin to atrophy, unlike LLMs [1].
IDEs, static linters, and syntax highlighters aren't the cause of a global microchip shortage, immensely increased energy demand, or the destruction of rare works. They have not, at any point, been the cause of effectively DDoS attacks in an effort to slurp up all of the internet's data, or the extensive proliferation of hallucinated content on the internet.
The development of IDEs, static linters, and syntax highlighters has at no point employed low-paid labor from third world countries for data labelling or safety filtering, exposing thousands of people to violent and abusive content for multiple hours a day.
Any of these issues alone would be a reasonable cause for adopting a policy to avoid using such tools. Calling it equivalent to not using IDEs or linters is bizarre to me.
There were many folks rejecting IDes for long while and also RAD. They kept doing assembly and C with macros’ all over.
Still I’m quite alright with people kneading on one hand while there’s the big bad Jacquard Loom.
BTW I vividly remember there was the older non-programmable loom at my grandmas place and it was huge. Like one room big. People used both techniques though and nobody hated it. Eventually there was also a foot powered Zinger and eventually the electrical one. All these coexisted and I’ve never seen a printed manifesto against any of them.
It’s truly a waste of time to post this sort of content here anymore. The community is too far gone and the hackers and enthusiasts have long left for greener pastures.
The torch of software engineering will be carried by people like the author going forward.
I agree with most of what’s written here though the tone is a bit smug and off-putting. The important point is this though:
> corporate executives love AI because it is extremely good at one thing - making you think it knows what it’s talking about, and masterfully avoiding any accountability.
Whether or not the LLM output is actually correct is often overshadowed by efforts to convince people that it is. This to me is the most concerning thing about AI (in its current state): the potential for mis/disinformation is huge and the companies controlling AI are more interested in it being widely used than in it being factually correct.
Is it just me or if you replace in the article "A.I." with "Humans", it would still be plausible? Don't get me wrong, I think those are fine points, but I see as many applications of the same situations that would be generated by A.I. that were and are actively generated by humans.
"AI is designed to make you dependent on it" - pre-AI service subscriptions - music, movies, you name it.
"AI is not intelligent, and hallucinations are a feature" - yes, pretty much the same way most (if not all) humans I ever interacted with hallucinate some times; me included. And I don't think it needs fixing (it's not a disease, it's a feature for us also), it just needs dealing-with.
"AI is great at lying. And that’s it." - Where shall I start about humans lying and being great at it? I just can't seem to find a good example....
"AI is killing the environment and destroying people’s lives" - pretty much humans have been inflicting this kind of damage onto themselves and our environment since the start of time, and even more so once doing this accelerated due to heavy machinery that can do what humans never could.
"AI will lead to a tyrannical police state" - Again, don't get me started on the ingenuity of humans building tyrannical police states.
I mostly disagree with this article but I will fight and die on the hill that says AI is no good for things like game development. Anything where human aesthetic preferences are the bottleneck.
Agentic game dev is a fantasy. All it takes is 5-10 minutes of unmonitored changes to scenes and scripts before I am catapulted into a realm of uncertainty and no longer have any control over the ship. The safest thing is still to copypasta mono behaviors into chatgpt web client and otherwise retain complete control over how the scenes and assets are organized. Anything more is like paralysis over time.
You'd think there would be some massive revolution in game dev tooling by now but it's mostly been crickets. I suspect it will remain that way. Getting a game to Steam is easier than ever, but the market seems indifferent. All these robots are doing is stacking a bunch of rows in databases and files on CDNs that no one will ever look at.
This statement reminds me of how older Queen albums like A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races proudly stated that No synthesizers! were used in the production of songs like Bohemian Rhapsody. Of course Queen did eventually relent and used these instruments on later albums. Did they do right in not using synths back then? Sure they did. Did they do right in using synths in their later albums? Sure they did. Does a statement like No synthesizers! or 'We never use AI. For anything' have added value other than informing the reader about the tools used to create a work? No, not really.
I use it for new code base summary, documentation lookup, code review, improvement suggestions, security audit, everything but writing code, I still do that by hand. I'm more productive and my skills improve. Reviewing slop burns me out. I can't be the only one.
It occurred to me as well that this is ragebait trolling too since being disconnected this much from reality would have been concerning. The author's app can be rewritten with the use of AI in one day (pessimistically speaking).
> AI will lead to a tyrannical police state
> What will happen once the rug invariably gets pulled? Those data centers will start serving another purpose.
> All around the world, governments are assembling massive networks of cameras, “license plate readers” that are suspiciously equipped with microphones sensitive enough to listen in on your conversations, and other unimaginable surveillance devices.
> All that computing power built up under the guise of bringing about the “AI future” will start being used to spy on you, follow your every movement, listen to all your calls, and more.
Isn't there a case to be made that this is/already has been the case and is not uniquely an AI thing? The governements of the world weren't waiting for ChatGPT to go viral before deciding to spy on their citizens so why we blame AI for this?
Are you saying large language models can better for surveillance? The article says all the data center power will be used to spy on you but that makes 0 sense, why would you need that much power to do what you have already done for so long so well? What is the LLM adding here that makes us scale this to previously impossible levels?
This is the truth! We are living in a surveillance state that would make Stalin green with envy.
We are also seeing daily examples of this surveillance state being used against political opponents, powerful bloggers and journalists among the alternative media, and regular citizens who said the wrong thing at the wrong time.
Since human beings are easily corrupted by power, this system will be weaponized more and more, and democracy will be hacked away at as well, until we are living in an authoritarian society with a democratic fig leaf, as we can see among the dirka-dirka-stans of the world.
I thought this was written a year ago or so, but it seems to be from July—or at least this is what the Wayback Machine can show. These points at the bottom about "looking under the hood" are either of someone who has not kept up with the technology or does not really grasp what it is capable of: an oversimplification that can be excused by neither.
What really is annoying in all these "stances" is how it boils to a pursuit of quality and idealistic views that are —while appreciated— not really going to necessarily help the product. If someone is going to choose you over X or Y just because you don't use AI, then by all means let them do so; but most likely someone will use AI to replace you, even if you were a programming language or an OS!
If your problem is with environment, sovereignty, and tech feudalism, then by all means I totally agree with you; it sucks, and we should find solutions, not abandon the tech just because it enables greedy psychos to gain more billions. If anything, it's now more important than ever to have a voice, as this technology can lead the way to meaningful automations to help small business owners get on even ground with bigger players by providing them necessary tools to focus on what they actually do, rather than chasing tech and SaaS solutions that dry their wallets. Or can enable individuals who can't afford education/research in a certain area to at least get started by asking questions and finding resources without the stigma or lostness of doing so that many face.
Finally. I am sorry but the "AI will replace you" argument is getting old and silly! If you are to be replaced by AI or X, then neither AI nor X are the problem: it's the people who chose to replace you in the first place. You were replaceable to them; they just lacked the opportunity.
At the end, I think all opinions matter, but sometimes opinions become a jail.
Whether or not this person uses AI is their concern, but I see this get bandied about a lot and I think it's worth talking about,
Large Language Models are nothing but a fancy autocorrect. Where they differ from your phone’s keyboard is the size of their memory, which they can use to predict the possible next word, based on a huge database of previous words. But that’s all it is, a prediction.
The AI doesn’t know or understand what it’s writing. Give the same AI the same prompt, and watch it give you two completely different answers. It can guess, but it will never know. Fixing this would require a complete rebuilding of the way the Large Language Model operates.
To plagiarize myself, it is indeed true that all models are, at their core, predictors of what occurs next in a sequence. But I think it's worth exploring the implication of what that means.
If you've tried making one yourself, you'll find that when fed tiny pieces of information for a few tasks at a small scale, this technique results in something that sorta, kinda works. Or, works surprisingly well.
But when scaled... When the amount of information starts approaching the sum of all human knowledge, the tasks start approaching all useful applications of that human knowledge, and the fidelity of the predictor approaches incomprehensible sizes, the starts encodes / becomes (I'd argue it becomes) something that can model all human knowledge.
It feels wrong to say that, but let me explain, what is the best way to predict the behavior of a ball constrained in two directions that bounces with initial vertical velocity v(y) (y is up / down axis) and horizontal velocity v(x) (x is side by side in 1d) ?
If we purely look at it via a graph, it's by modelling the function of acceleration under earth's gravity.
If only a few points are given to you for this and you can't make something really sophisticated, then you'll make something that's rough that kinda sorta works and then call it a day.
But... if the number of points keeps increasing in number, precision and accuracy as well as the number of examples (assumed that data about air pressure, velocity and all other factors is included alongside these points), the fidelity with which you can replay / tweak the function keeps improving, and the number of times you can iterate keeps increasing, you'll eventually create a function that models that process so well that it intrinsically contains a good enough model of the deformation of the ball (provided the dataset contains information about elasticity of the ball's material, its dimensions and mass etc..), the nearly negligible (under normal conditions) effects of the ambient environment (provided there's diversity in the number of environments supplied), the oblateness of the Earth and minute changes in the gravitational field (the length of a seconds pendulum varies depending on where the experiment happens. It's presumed that all of the prior set of experiments were repeated across the Earth and the subtle, but real deviations were faithfully recorded)... and so much more.
A machine trained on the above with a large number of parameters, measures to prevent "laziness" and enough reps for high fidelity across a large enough dataset would start to approach a simulation of the ball falling. Because to predict what happens next in the sequence, you must model what's occurring in the sequence.
Now imagine doing that for other tangible and intangible things in this world. For all of human knowledge across all fields of endeavor. All experiences. No matter how noble, ignoble, notable or ignorable. But putting all of it into the soup that's this machine. Then at larger and larger scales, you eventually start encountering "good enough" models (in modelling the falling ball sense) for even the most hard to quantify / qualify things like grief and joy. At some point, by simply trying to predict what it has been taught ought to be the next part of the sequence in say... human interaction, it starts to make a model of something that hews ever closer to a full fidelity theory of mind.
Is there evidence for this? Kind of, yes. There are early indications that as machines are trained for an ever larger number of tasks at larger and larger scales, their internal representations converge. It's called the Platonic Representation Hypothesis. Overview and paper here, https://phillipi.github.io/prh/
It is my opinion that these machines are displaying a new form of intelligence that human beings haven't quite encountered before. They are the sum of all human knowledge made manifest and given voice by processes that nudge (bit-by-bit) what kind of step it ought to predict for the next part of whatever sequence it displays.
In my mind this means that, of course, these models can create new knowledge. This strains the analogy, but with the sum of all human mathematics within them, they can "reason" via the act of predicting what ought to come next.
Of course, these machines are "surprisingly" good at a lot of things the larger they get, because what the labs have created here is a rough version of humanity's collective knowledge given form and the ability to say hello.
I suspect that the current generation isn't close to the "true frontier" of what these machines could be. They are nowhere close to the sum of all human knowledge and endeavor. They are quite a way there, but they haven't yet achieved true completeness for domains where the data isn't so public.
I think it's the most exciting scientific and technological breakthrough of my lifetime. And I can't wait for us to get close to the true frontier of all domains.
I appreciate the example you’re using of the bouncing ball because it shows how additional data helps more accurately model the event and thus offers a more precise and correct prediction. However, that better modeling is based on the original data being correct, true, or factual. If LLMs are ingesting all written human knowledge (theoretically), then they are ingesting “truth” as well as errors, falsehoods, and subjective beliefs that don’t necessarily reflect accepted practices. Right now, they don’t seem fully capable of differentiating between these, which is why they sometimes produce bizarre inaccuracies for things like world events, history, culture, etc.
Just because LLMs are (or can be) reliable predictors in some domains does not mean they are (or can be) in all domains.
Not necessarily. No sensor is reliable, all sensors have noise and they drift. It's why you use something like a kalman filter.
It's worth doing it over an afternoon, but you can do very simple curve fitting with real sensor data from your smartphone and you'll see it naturally starts to ignore extremes / becomes accurate.
As long as there are enough correct data points, the incorrect data shouldn't matter. How much is enough is a black art though.
I was thinking about this anti AI sentiment and how it is related to American individualism. In socialist countries like China there has never been a protest related to data centres or job loss etc. unlike in the USA. Because the large scale impact of AI on the country is exclusively a net positive.
The reduction of the individuals cost of labour by also reduces perceived egalitarianism which is the mental model used by ultra capitalists to allow themselves to sleep at night whilst homeless people beg for food on the streets.
The long term impact of AI on society is exclusively a net positive if utilised in the correct way. But most of the westerners lack faith in government fiscal policy and think that they are going to be left destitute when they can no longer provide for themselves. When in fact UBI is going to be the most likely outcome.
They are myopically focusing on the short term labour market effects of AI on their own profession instead of realising the long term utopian societal outcome.
"We need to ban AI because I'm going to lose my job!" - This is only said by someone who is winning in their society and wants to maintain the status quo not by those who slipped through the cracks.
That certainly couldn't be why they feel that threatened. But just think, using AI to build it will literally destroy Bambi's entire forest. Just that one prompt. Think about it.
Look, it’s fine to be anti AI. You don’t need to justify it.
But when you say it’s bad at programming then you’re just proving your own ignorance. Honestly saying AI can’t program in the same breath as saying you don’t use it makes you look like a fool.
Be anti AI - no problem with that, just don’t be an ignorant ill informed fool.
Believe it or not, the very first LLM was actually invented by Nazis who live on the dark side of the moon. The A in AI? Adolf.
How many articles do we really need about how AI will break into your house and steal your TV, narrated from the perspective of someone who thinks Terminator was realistic? This in particular feels like a shallow marketing ploy to appeal to luddites; especially since as simonw has discovered, it depends on code produced by Claude anyway.
I find it very interesting that in a website that is ostensibly made up of the curious minded, the top level responses are everything but. From accusations of religious rhetoric, to outright dismissing the argument because they are 'old'. And the conversation naturally veers back into 'are humans not prediction machines themselves?', 'LLMs are much improved recently' and 'hand coding will be relegated to the artisans like other forms of art'. Nothing intellectually stimulating from the AI proponent crowd. Perhaps that's why they are fascinated by LLMs to begin with.
The app is Cork: https://github.com/buresdv/Cork/network/dependencies
It depends on Factory: https://github.com/hmlongco/Factory/blob/main/CLAUDE.md
Sticking to a strident "No AI" policy developing software is going to become increasingly difficult.
It's a dependency that clearly AI is used for during development. Fair point since the blog post is phrased like a total ban on AI in the supply chain
Edit: Landing page says "Completely free of AI. Read our stance." in the hero section. That borders on false advertising
I'd be interested to see the project author's reaction to this. Will he downgrade to an older version of the library out of principle?
Why would you expect a dogmatic approach instead of a more pragmatic one?
We're discussing this on a submission of a dogmatic manifesto.
"We never use AI. For anything." doesn't mean "We audit every single one of our dependencies, and make sure they never use AI".
"We never use AI. For anything." becomes a much weaker statement when you exclude dependencies. Your whole app could just be a thin wrapper around some third party dependency which leans heavily on AI.
It makes the manifested statements become more realistic, sure, as I doubt any dogmatic approach could even exist for long. But I don't think this warrants anybody to bring out the pitchforks and scream "HYPOCRISY!", though...
This whole thing is a matter of choice, and we shouldn't necessarily conflate the role we take when we consume/use a dependency/tool with the role of crafting own things. I, for one, can apply agency solely on things that offer me means to change them.
> Completely free of AI. Read our stance.
> Turns out to not audit dependencies
It surely can. It's what I would assume by default.
Oh I shall propose my dependency injection lib, it has not and will never use AI…
I think there's merit to it. It's not as if doing it exclusively with AI is all sunshine and rainbows. As someone doing agentic engineering at work I'm actually starting to sour on it after seeing what it's doing to people's ability to think for themselves and even do basic software engineering tasks.
“I’m not an elitist,” Green said. “It’s just that I’d much rather sculpt or write in my journal or read Proust than sit there passively staring at some phosphorescent screen.”
https://theonion.com/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-doesn...
Off-topic, but this Onion piece is a bit weak. The hook is that the man is obnoxious about his habit of not watching TV, and that's all there is to it.
Some stuff from the Onion is genius, but this is not it.
Handcrafted software will find it's own market the same way that handcrafted clothing, furniture and other previously industrialized goods that became commodities did. They'll be more expensive generally and it'll be a smaller market overall, you'll always have some people who will love them all the same. Not my choice, but I can understand why they would want it.
The difference is that one is physical and the other digital. Digital art, even if exceptionally high quality, has been commoditized by artists from developing countries asking dumping wages, and not recovered since. People who have enough money to buy for the "soul" of an object, and the labor behind it, usually buy physical.
I agree with you but I believe the definition of handcrafted will shift to include software produced partly by AI, just as most handcrafted things involve industrial machinary at some point.
But then, I can also imagine a world where nobody cares enough about writing code and instead we have "human designed software" just as we currently have human designed cars and fridges but few made by hand (and no market for them). Then, handwritten software becomes an impressive curiosity like Chris Sawyer's original Rollercoaster Tycoon written entirely in ASM.
Etsy like situation is very possibly. Where people will simply lie about something being handcrafted to sell it at some sort of premium. And then when questioned defend it with reasoning like everyone else is doing it or it doesn't matter or it is actually superior.
> All that computing power built up under the guise of bringing about the “AI future” will start being used to spy on you, follow your every movement, listen to all your calls, and more.
This post sounds like someone who lives in deep in an echo chamber and has a warped reality because of it. That said I read this point and was like yup they’re right about one thing anyway.
There's a reason the biggest market for datacenters is in northern Virginia, and it ain't for the cheap power.
So does this one.
So does this one.
The hacker news echo chamber gone literal.
I thought we could have a good thing go on.
If the judgement is already cast, why let it go to waste?
As much as I want to agree with this, for some of the reasons given, even I must admit that AI does have its uses. I think a reasonable take is the ObjFW one:
https://git.nil.im/ObjFW/ObjFW/src/branch/main/documentation...
> AI/LLMs cannot be used to generate any code, documentation, assets or similar – all of it needs to be 100% written by a human.
> Utilizing AI/LLMs to help find bugs in the code or to help with debugging is acceptable. However, if the AI/LLM proposes a patch, this cannot be used – the AI/LLM should be instructed to only explain bugs or fixes, but never produce any code.
> Using an AI/LLM agent to create tickets is not acceptable. However, using an AI/LLM for translation between languages in tickets is acceptable.
Reads like religion, not fact based analysis.
I'm by now past the point where I thought "this is a great tool that will help me programming" to the fear phase where I know it will destroy my job and career. But still I can't agree fully with the article. Hallucinations are not the issue. We can extract value from it even when it does hallucinate.
The only reason we're having this discussion is because AI is intelligent and therefore poses a threat to us.
If I was maintaining such a boutique implementation I could probably do without AI as well, sans the moral high ground posting.
To put it bluntly: this particular product category is now an afternoon's vibe-coding project for one person. The result would be worse code, probably. Also probably still good enough.
> The result would be worse code, probably. Also probably still good enough.
And that's because the definition of "good enough" is drifting towards "crappy", has been for decades, now accelerated by the AI.
Was thinking the other day how the bars of quality for software pre-Internet was so much higher just because any small software shop only ever had one shot: ship your software on floppy disks, with practically no chance to patch and fix bugs later. People either like your 1.0 or they don't and that's your whole business story.
Then came the Internet, bug fix updates became so much easier, and with it came crappification and bugs-as-a-norm attitude.
And now this.
Not whining, just stating the facts.
> And that's because the definition of "good enough" is drifting towards "crappy", has been for decades, now accelerated by the AI.
Interestingly I have found the opposite in the software I write. LLMs make it so easy to get the basics in place that I spend the time on the details and polish.
Are you measuring the number of bugs per line of code in production, compared to pre-AI? That's the metric.
Nothing so scientific. Im just having a lot of fun using the software I write with LLMs because I can easily add polish and build things I didnt have time for before.
Ah yes, just want I want, slopcoded dev tools by people who don’t understand what the fuck they’re doing and who will drop support the moment their agents hit some minor issue.
Yeah. What do they want, a golden star next to their name?
This is the kind of posturing that leads nowhere. If you're concerned about resource usage then use an open model locally
Why would an open local model use less resources?
You don't usually cool local GPU's with community water and you don't need to cut down trees to create room for data-center.
I would love that local AI's, would be good enough for my coding demands, but so far It's not there yet for me.
I expect the energy usage of a thousand people all running their own local models is significantly less efficient than those same people sharing a model hosted in a data center.
My advice: let these people think what they want, it reduces competition in an already saturated market
Remember, in a consumer economy, anything that reduces the number of consumers is risky. Tech people such as developers are well-paid. Reducing their numbers will be a noticeable loss of market.
Yeah, companies might save headcount, but the cost of automation and lost customers? Given the market momentum, we’ll learn this over the next few years.
And how will debugging occur if there’s no strong grasp on the current code or purpose?
More developers need to grow a spine and take this stance.
Good on them, and shame on those dumping on them.
They're right about everything, but at the same time it actually has become useful.
Sensible not to depend on it and create a vibe-coded mess, but keep everything modular & review the generated code closely and you can go back to humans-only in future with no problems.
If someone offered a whole team of devs in India for an unknown number of months basically for free, one would be a fool to turn that down even knowing it wouldn't last forever. Claude etc feels like the same kinda deal.
> If someone offered a whole team of devs in India for an unknown number of months basically for free, one would be a fool to turn that down even knowing it wouldn't last forever. Claude etc feels like the same kinda deal.
I've made a lot of money fixing software where people paid for those offshore teams and they would have been better off having not done that and writing maintainable software from the start. They were fools paying for it and they still would have been fools if it had been free.
Sure, I've been part of "in-sourcing" failing projects too, but it was always a sign of management incompetence rather than anything else. It's easy to shift the blame to an outsourcer when it's been GIGO; constantly changing requirements, feature creep, no budget for maintenance, the usual stuff that kills codebases.
I think this whole piece is just a collection of lazy cliches.
- Rug pull scam
What's going to happen when the AI companies jack up prices 20x to meet API prices? 1: they won't, because they'll get their lunch eaten immediately by 2: the local models that are almost as good that you can run yourself (with a few thousand in hardware costs).
- AI is not intelligent
This doesn't matter at all, as long as it performs the task who cares? It's better that it's not intelligent because otherwise we'd be enslaving it. A plane doesn't flap its wings but it gets you somewhere - without actually "flying".
Hallucinations are also clearly way less prevalent than, say, 2023. Perhaps it's not possible to get rid of them totally, but there's much fewer.
- AI is the most successful con man in history
If this is true, won't AI-free companies soon outcompete ones that use AI? I'm afraid this is just wishful thinking. You can easily create complete garbage with AI but if you know how to code you can also be much more productive, hence why so many renowned programmers, mathematicians, creators of languages and so on use it.
- AI is killing the environment and destroying people’s lives
How could a data centre be polluting the water with rust? The power problem is true but the amount of land used by them is miniscule.
- AI will lead to a tyrannical police state
It could contribute, but we've had surveillance since long before AI. The Stasi had mass surveillance without even computers (which I would say have been much more conducive to the proliferation of surveillance).
- Nobody knows what AI even is
Then what did you just spend the rest of the page complaining about?
Thanks for writing this! Was about to say something adjacent but much less structured and precise.
Seems like this is old?
> AI is not intelligent, and hallucinations are a feature
How the times have changed... I would have agreed two years ago.
This quote from the post makes me sad for all the researchers and all the math and the scaling and the investing that I believe was done in good faith in pursuit of pure science and betterment for us all:
"AI is designed to make you dependent on it"
This is throwing a lot of agentic opacity bathwater and not really looking what else's in there.
A lot of these criticisms seem to be very 2023-coded.
There have been a lot of hiccups to the transition towards using AI-assisted code but, ignoring some of that sloppiness, I've enjoyed the product velocity from some of the services/apps I know that heavily use coding agents.
Earliest capture on the Internet Archive is July 15th so I think this is recent: https://web.archive.org/web/20260715131001/https://corkmac.a...
I don’t think that something that feels like aura farming is an especially sound basis on which to choose your technology stack.
If you’ve done a proper cost-benefit analysis and truly found that it’s not yet worth it for your use case, great.
But if you’ve decided it _would_ be helpful but then decided ostentatiously not to use it so you can farm clout on Twitter… not so good.
We're entering a hilarious new world where people advertise their "artesanal", "hand carved", "organic" software of all things.
Trying to hold back the tide hasn't worked particularly often for innovation throughout human history
Reminds me the viral "lonely penguin" video from Werner Herzog's documentary Encounters at the End of the World shows a single penguin turn away from the sea and walked fatal interior mountains of Antarctica instead of staying with its group
This feels like saying you'll never use self-driving cars.
Sure, LLM effectiveness might seem debatable to some (not for me), but these things improve frequently. So saying you'll never use it, is a red flag to me and I question what other technologies and advancements you ignore.
That's a strange hill to die on. It's like saying we will never use an IDE or static linter or syntax highlighter etc...
Also there are already non-VC subsidized hosted open weights LLM providers which should give you a very good sense of the marginal cost.
IDEs and static linters are tools that produce deterministic results, and AI does not. You simply can't compare them.
And the human beings who use them to produce code don't produce deterministic results either. Current harnesses have come a long a way to make non determinism not be a problem for quite a few areas. And the scope keeps increasing every day.
Yet nevertheless, both e.g. syntax highlighting and intellisense have been heralded as things that "fry ur brain". So have high level programming languages by the way.
To give you a particularly specific example, Rob Pike really wants you to know that if you use syntax highlighting, he thinks of you as a child.
So, determinism is the core of the issue for you?
I'm sorry but you can compare them in the sense that they're just computer programs that can be useful to you.
AI is as deterministic as a human programmer. A programmer who is burned out and has not slept well produces code of a different quality than a programmer who has slept well and is highly motivated. That's hardly deterministic. AI can be made deterministic enough if you have strict quality gates, just like with humans.
IDEs, static linters, and syntax highlighters aren't designed to replace any part of the problem solving process, but rather augment them. It's impossible to become dependent on any of these tools to the point where your cognitive skills begin to atrophy, unlike LLMs [1].
IDEs, static linters, and syntax highlighters aren't the cause of a global microchip shortage, immensely increased energy demand, or the destruction of rare works. They have not, at any point, been the cause of effectively DDoS attacks in an effort to slurp up all of the internet's data, or the extensive proliferation of hallucinated content on the internet.
The development of IDEs, static linters, and syntax highlighters has at no point employed low-paid labor from third world countries for data labelling or safety filtering, exposing thousands of people to violent and abusive content for multiple hours a day.
Any of these issues alone would be a reasonable cause for adopting a policy to avoid using such tools. Calling it equivalent to not using IDEs or linters is bizarre to me.
* [1]: https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...
There were many folks rejecting IDes for long while and also RAD. They kept doing assembly and C with macros’ all over.
Still I’m quite alright with people kneading on one hand while there’s the big bad Jacquard Loom.
BTW I vividly remember there was the older non-programmable loom at my grandmas place and it was huge. Like one room big. People used both techniques though and nobody hated it. Eventually there was also a foot powered Zinger and eventually the electrical one. All these coexisted and I’ve never seen a printed manifesto against any of them.
Pretty sure also people were smarter back then.
I am pretty sure the Luddites did more than just print manifestos.
There were tons of manifestos against industrial machinery. Decades of social movements critiqued industrial machinery from the Luddites onwards.
You cant compare AI to a compiler. Makes no sense at all.
I get what they want to state, but in the end the progress won't be stopped. It never was. If the opportunity exists, it will be used.
It’s truly a waste of time to post this sort of content here anymore. The community is too far gone and the hackers and enthusiasts have long left for greener pastures.
The torch of software engineering will be carried by people like the author going forward.
I agree with most of what’s written here though the tone is a bit smug and off-putting. The important point is this though:
> corporate executives love AI because it is extremely good at one thing - making you think it knows what it’s talking about, and masterfully avoiding any accountability.
Whether or not the LLM output is actually correct is often overshadowed by efforts to convince people that it is. This to me is the most concerning thing about AI (in its current state): the potential for mis/disinformation is huge and the companies controlling AI are more interested in it being widely used than in it being factually correct.
Is it just me or if you replace in the article "A.I." with "Humans", it would still be plausible? Don't get me wrong, I think those are fine points, but I see as many applications of the same situations that would be generated by A.I. that were and are actively generated by humans.
"AI is designed to make you dependent on it" - pre-AI service subscriptions - music, movies, you name it.
"AI is not intelligent, and hallucinations are a feature" - yes, pretty much the same way most (if not all) humans I ever interacted with hallucinate some times; me included. And I don't think it needs fixing (it's not a disease, it's a feature for us also), it just needs dealing-with.
"AI is great at lying. And that’s it." - Where shall I start about humans lying and being great at it? I just can't seem to find a good example....
"AI is killing the environment and destroying people’s lives" - pretty much humans have been inflicting this kind of damage onto themselves and our environment since the start of time, and even more so once doing this accelerated due to heavy machinery that can do what humans never could.
"AI will lead to a tyrannical police state" - Again, don't get me started on the ingenuity of humans building tyrannical police states.
[Edit: typos]
I mostly disagree with this article but I will fight and die on the hill that says AI is no good for things like game development. Anything where human aesthetic preferences are the bottleneck.
Agentic game dev is a fantasy. All it takes is 5-10 minutes of unmonitored changes to scenes and scripts before I am catapulted into a realm of uncertainty and no longer have any control over the ship. The safest thing is still to copypasta mono behaviors into chatgpt web client and otherwise retain complete control over how the scenes and assets are organized. Anything more is like paralysis over time.
You'd think there would be some massive revolution in game dev tooling by now but it's mostly been crickets. I suspect it will remain that way. Getting a game to Steam is easier than ever, but the market seems indifferent. All these robots are doing is stacking a bunch of rows in databases and files on CDNs that no one will ever look at.
This statement reminds me of how older Queen albums like A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races proudly stated that No synthesizers! were used in the production of songs like Bohemian Rhapsody. Of course Queen did eventually relent and used these instruments on later albums. Did they do right in not using synths back then? Sure they did. Did they do right in using synths in their later albums? Sure they did. Does a statement like No synthesizers! or 'We never use AI. For anything' have added value other than informing the reader about the tools used to create a work? No, not really.
I use it for new code base summary, documentation lookup, code review, improvement suggestions, security audit, everything but writing code, I still do that by hand. I'm more productive and my skills improve. Reviewing slop burns me out. I can't be the only one.
This reads like ragebait trolling, like it's on purpose so completely out of touch to gain attention.
But maybe it was written years ago idk.
It occurred to me as well that this is ragebait trolling too since being disconnected this much from reality would have been concerning. The author's app can be rewritten with the use of AI in one day (pessimistically speaking).
> AI will lead to a tyrannical police state > What will happen once the rug invariably gets pulled? Those data centers will start serving another purpose. > All around the world, governments are assembling massive networks of cameras, “license plate readers” that are suspiciously equipped with microphones sensitive enough to listen in on your conversations, and other unimaginable surveillance devices. > All that computing power built up under the guise of bringing about the “AI future” will start being used to spy on you, follow your every movement, listen to all your calls, and more.
Isn't there a case to be made that this is/already has been the case and is not uniquely an AI thing? The governements of the world weren't waiting for ChatGPT to go viral before deciding to spy on their citizens so why we blame AI for this?
> The governements of the world weren't waiting for ChatGPT to go viral before deciding to spy on their citizens so why we blame AI for this?
Because AI can do this at a scale previously impossible.
Are you saying large language models can better for surveillance? The article says all the data center power will be used to spy on you but that makes 0 sense, why would you need that much power to do what you have already done for so long so well? What is the LLM adding here that makes us scale this to previously impossible levels?
This is the truth! We are living in a surveillance state that would make Stalin green with envy.
We are also seeing daily examples of this surveillance state being used against political opponents, powerful bloggers and journalists among the alternative media, and regular citizens who said the wrong thing at the wrong time.
Since human beings are easily corrupted by power, this system will be weaponized more and more, and democracy will be hacked away at as well, until we are living in an authoritarian society with a democratic fig leaf, as we can see among the dirka-dirka-stans of the world.
> We are still in the gravy train part of the rug pull scam
Can we stop using this argument? Multiple Opus/Fable class open source models have shown the prices are sustainable with open models and self hosting.
People using these arguments are stopping better arguments from surfacing (loss of agency in workplace, junor ot senior training path, etc).
I thought this was written a year ago or so, but it seems to be from July—or at least this is what the Wayback Machine can show. These points at the bottom about "looking under the hood" are either of someone who has not kept up with the technology or does not really grasp what it is capable of: an oversimplification that can be excused by neither.
What really is annoying in all these "stances" is how it boils to a pursuit of quality and idealistic views that are —while appreciated— not really going to necessarily help the product. If someone is going to choose you over X or Y just because you don't use AI, then by all means let them do so; but most likely someone will use AI to replace you, even if you were a programming language or an OS!
If your problem is with environment, sovereignty, and tech feudalism, then by all means I totally agree with you; it sucks, and we should find solutions, not abandon the tech just because it enables greedy psychos to gain more billions. If anything, it's now more important than ever to have a voice, as this technology can lead the way to meaningful automations to help small business owners get on even ground with bigger players by providing them necessary tools to focus on what they actually do, rather than chasing tech and SaaS solutions that dry their wallets. Or can enable individuals who can't afford education/research in a certain area to at least get started by asking questions and finding resources without the stigma or lostness of doing so that many face.
Finally. I am sorry but the "AI will replace you" argument is getting old and silly! If you are to be replaced by AI or X, then neither AI nor X are the problem: it's the people who chose to replace you in the first place. You were replaceable to them; they just lacked the opportunity.
At the end, I think all opinions matter, but sometimes opinions become a jail.
Whether or not this person uses AI is their concern, but I see this get bandied about a lot and I think it's worth talking about,
To plagiarize myself, it is indeed true that all models are, at their core, predictors of what occurs next in a sequence. But I think it's worth exploring the implication of what that means.If you've tried making one yourself, you'll find that when fed tiny pieces of information for a few tasks at a small scale, this technique results in something that sorta, kinda works. Or, works surprisingly well.
But when scaled... When the amount of information starts approaching the sum of all human knowledge, the tasks start approaching all useful applications of that human knowledge, and the fidelity of the predictor approaches incomprehensible sizes, the starts encodes / becomes (I'd argue it becomes) something that can model all human knowledge.
It feels wrong to say that, but let me explain, what is the best way to predict the behavior of a ball constrained in two directions that bounces with initial vertical velocity v(y) (y is up / down axis) and horizontal velocity v(x) (x is side by side in 1d) ?
If we purely look at it via a graph, it's by modelling the function of acceleration under earth's gravity.
If only a few points are given to you for this and you can't make something really sophisticated, then you'll make something that's rough that kinda sorta works and then call it a day.
But... if the number of points keeps increasing in number, precision and accuracy as well as the number of examples (assumed that data about air pressure, velocity and all other factors is included alongside these points), the fidelity with which you can replay / tweak the function keeps improving, and the number of times you can iterate keeps increasing, you'll eventually create a function that models that process so well that it intrinsically contains a good enough model of the deformation of the ball (provided the dataset contains information about elasticity of the ball's material, its dimensions and mass etc..), the nearly negligible (under normal conditions) effects of the ambient environment (provided there's diversity in the number of environments supplied), the oblateness of the Earth and minute changes in the gravitational field (the length of a seconds pendulum varies depending on where the experiment happens. It's presumed that all of the prior set of experiments were repeated across the Earth and the subtle, but real deviations were faithfully recorded)... and so much more.
A machine trained on the above with a large number of parameters, measures to prevent "laziness" and enough reps for high fidelity across a large enough dataset would start to approach a simulation of the ball falling. Because to predict what happens next in the sequence, you must model what's occurring in the sequence.
Now imagine doing that for other tangible and intangible things in this world. For all of human knowledge across all fields of endeavor. All experiences. No matter how noble, ignoble, notable or ignorable. But putting all of it into the soup that's this machine. Then at larger and larger scales, you eventually start encountering "good enough" models (in modelling the falling ball sense) for even the most hard to quantify / qualify things like grief and joy. At some point, by simply trying to predict what it has been taught ought to be the next part of the sequence in say... human interaction, it starts to make a model of something that hews ever closer to a full fidelity theory of mind.
Is there evidence for this? Kind of, yes. There are early indications that as machines are trained for an ever larger number of tasks at larger and larger scales, their internal representations converge. It's called the Platonic Representation Hypothesis. Overview and paper here, https://phillipi.github.io/prh/
It is my opinion that these machines are displaying a new form of intelligence that human beings haven't quite encountered before. They are the sum of all human knowledge made manifest and given voice by processes that nudge (bit-by-bit) what kind of step it ought to predict for the next part of whatever sequence it displays.
In my mind this means that, of course, these models can create new knowledge. This strains the analogy, but with the sum of all human mathematics within them, they can "reason" via the act of predicting what ought to come next.
Of course, these machines are "surprisingly" good at a lot of things the larger they get, because what the labs have created here is a rough version of humanity's collective knowledge given form and the ability to say hello.
I suspect that the current generation isn't close to the "true frontier" of what these machines could be. They are nowhere close to the sum of all human knowledge and endeavor. They are quite a way there, but they haven't yet achieved true completeness for domains where the data isn't so public.
I think it's the most exciting scientific and technological breakthrough of my lifetime. And I can't wait for us to get close to the true frontier of all domains.
I appreciate the example you’re using of the bouncing ball because it shows how additional data helps more accurately model the event and thus offers a more precise and correct prediction. However, that better modeling is based on the original data being correct, true, or factual. If LLMs are ingesting all written human knowledge (theoretically), then they are ingesting “truth” as well as errors, falsehoods, and subjective beliefs that don’t necessarily reflect accepted practices. Right now, they don’t seem fully capable of differentiating between these, which is why they sometimes produce bizarre inaccuracies for things like world events, history, culture, etc.
Just because LLMs are (or can be) reliable predictors in some domains does not mean they are (or can be) in all domains.
Not necessarily. No sensor is reliable, all sensors have noise and they drift. It's why you use something like a kalman filter.
It's worth doing it over an afternoon, but you can do very simple curve fitting with real sensor data from your smartphone and you'll see it naturally starts to ignore extremes / becomes accurate.
As long as there are enough correct data points, the incorrect data shouldn't matter. How much is enough is a black art though.
if someone knows this guy, please provide him a good therapist, he really needs one.
What about local AI?
I was thinking about this anti AI sentiment and how it is related to American individualism. In socialist countries like China there has never been a protest related to data centres or job loss etc. unlike in the USA. Because the large scale impact of AI on the country is exclusively a net positive.
The reduction of the individuals cost of labour by also reduces perceived egalitarianism which is the mental model used by ultra capitalists to allow themselves to sleep at night whilst homeless people beg for food on the streets.
The long term impact of AI on society is exclusively a net positive if utilised in the correct way. But most of the westerners lack faith in government fiscal policy and think that they are going to be left destitute when they can no longer provide for themselves. When in fact UBI is going to be the most likely outcome.
They are myopically focusing on the short term labour market effects of AI on their own profession instead of realising the long term utopian societal outcome.
"We need to ban AI because I'm going to lose my job!" - This is only said by someone who is winning in their society and wants to maintain the status quo not by those who slipped through the cracks.
Ironic, as AI can probably build this app locally in an hour or so.
That certainly couldn't be why they feel that threatened. But just think, using AI to build it will literally destroy Bambi's entire forest. Just that one prompt. Think about it.
Another AI hater making a fool of themself.
Look, it’s fine to be anti AI. You don’t need to justify it.
But when you say it’s bad at programming then you’re just proving your own ignorance. Honestly saying AI can’t program in the same breath as saying you don’t use it makes you look like a fool.
Be anti AI - no problem with that, just don’t be an ignorant ill informed fool.
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Believe it or not, the very first LLM was actually invented by Nazis who live on the dark side of the moon. The A in AI? Adolf.
How many articles do we really need about how AI will break into your house and steal your TV, narrated from the perspective of someone who thinks Terminator was realistic? This in particular feels like a shallow marketing ploy to appeal to luddites; especially since as simonw has discovered, it depends on code produced by Claude anyway.
I find it very interesting that in a website that is ostensibly made up of the curious minded, the top level responses are everything but. From accusations of religious rhetoric, to outright dismissing the argument because they are 'old'. And the conversation naturally veers back into 'are humans not prediction machines themselves?', 'LLMs are much improved recently' and 'hand coding will be relegated to the artisans like other forms of art'. Nothing intellectually stimulating from the AI proponent crowd. Perhaps that's why they are fascinated by LLMs to begin with.
What doesn't sound intellectually stimulating is grouping up all AI proponents in a single crowd.
Also, the anti-AI author's app leverages a critical dependency that does use AI. So their stance pass no sniff test.