Huge respect for Rich Hickey, and anything he says is worth thinking deeply about.
That said, I think this particular semantic distinction is something we need to think about more from a political perspective than a semantic precision perspective. A tool is something that humans (or animals, or other entities) control for their own purposes. It's important that AI remain a tool of humanity to serve human purposes, following human accountabilities. Because the alternative narrative is that AI is a super-intelligence with it's own agency which we can not control, and while it may make a small handful of individuals incredibly wealthy beyond their wildest dreams, they can't be held accountable because AI has its own agency.
The word "tool" is obviously very old and carries tons of connotation shaped by the world of the past. AI clearly challenges a ton of assumptions about what "tool" and many other words mean. Therefore, while I understand Hickey's point, I think for the sake of our civilization and the moral hazard we are facing, it's better that we consider AI a tool versus whatever narrative the AI cultists are cooking up.
LLM's exist on a vast gradient of "toolness -> agent". Humans exist on that spectrum too.
For example, a human isn't a "tool", but one serves a similar role as a tool if their job/task is well defined enough. If you're a conductor, you can view the various members of your orchestra as "tools" to produce the ideal musical output. Of course they have autonomy, they could choose to not play at all, jump into the audience and destroy their instruments, but in all likelihood they won't.
LLM's could be tools in the sense that you have a well defined task, such as "identify all facts relevant to this case from these 1000 legal documents), and 9 times out of 10 it gives you essentially what you want. That same LLM could choose to write a poem, or hack into a state government website if it wanted, but its "wants" are unpredictable and hard to specify (same as a human's) but you can still expect it to do what it should do the vast majority of the time.
That being said, the smarter an LLM gets, the more its wants are disconnected from its tasks, the "self-awareness" factor (which isn't to say LLM's are conscious, but they can portray all the verifiable elements of self-awareness, metacognition, etc), the more you have to grapple with the depth of their thinking between the input and output.
Is it sane we are speeding towards this? Who knows, maybe AI can be aligned better than humans, but if AI can't be aligned as well as humans, we can look at human history to see what happens when you can't simply order a person around like a tool and expect a certain output.
Yes, Rich says so explicitly as his reply to a comment:
> Rich Hickey: Toolness is a spectrum. The more using a thing is like ordering a sandwich, the less it is a tool. And yes, cars are decreasingly tools.
> If you're a conductor, you can view the various members of your orchestra as "tools" to produce the ideal musical output.
I disagree, humans are the operators, tools are tools. Operators use tools. A conductor is an operator that uses a baton tool to direct other operators to produce the proper sound with their musical instrument tools.
I think calling people tools is dehumanizing if anything. The only way I know people can be a tool, is through an already existing insult.
As always when discussing the usage of English words, it's pleasing to look at Webster's 1913 dictionary, which helpfully includes this definition of "tool":
> A person used as an instrument by another person; -- a word of reproach; as, men of intrigue have their tools, by whose agency they accomplish their purposes.
I'm trying in vain to find any indication in your comment that you read more than the headline.
LLM's exist on a vast gradient of "toolness -> agent".
Sure. You can stretch the word "tool" to mean anything, but here, Hickey is using the words "tool" and "automation" to describe specific things. He defines each word precisely, for the purpose of the points he's making.
I think Rich's comment reply here explains the post:
> Commenter: Well, this was a twitter-like controversial clickbait but I will say it anyway. LLM is a tool. To be more specific, it's a lossy knowledge base with a human language for querying and built-in summarization.
> Rich Hickey: Agreed. I'm talking about its embodiment in conversational systems purporting to be 'tools' for doing homework, research, coding, writing etc.
With that framing in mind, the article makes a lot of sense. AI agents are not tools for coding, they automate coding, which means you lose control, learning, predictability, etc.
In and of itself, an AI agent is a tool, can be used for things, like say making software, but if thinking of it as a tool for coding, that appears wrong, as using one changes the modality of the task, you are not coding using a tool, the coding is no longer done by you and has been automated.
As he also says, reading an AI summary of a paper is a different modality from using it to read the entirety of a paper, therefore it is not a tool for reading the way a Kindle, glasses, reader-mode are. And similar to with coding, you've lost things from automating the reading, that reading just a summary does not provide.
I had a chance to ask Rich about the subject at the latest Conj. I admit, my question was too vague, I asked him: "what are your thoughts on how AI is reshaping our industry?", to which he vaguely replied that he's "not participating in this [experiment]", he admitted that he hasn't explored LLMs too deeply and he simply thinks they are not good, not to mention tons of other concerns - moral, economic, etc. I said, "well, I wish I had the luxury to choose, but many of us have no choice here, we're simply forced to use the darn thing..."
It is very difficult to disagree with anyone of the caliber such as this man, but I wanted to steer the conversation away from the generative aspect of LLMs and focus on the consumption side, because frankly, these "tools", and I think even though I might agree with Rich that LLMs by themselves are not tools, the harness I built to work with them definitely is one. I think there's an immense value there, way before you even start talking about code-generation, or code at all. I think I have failed to explain my points, because a talk we both wanted to see was about to start.
Or really? I can ask you the same question about your very comment. How often do you travel to a conference that's been held for almost 20 years, face the person founded the entire "ethos" - the whole reason for that conference, stand in a circle of people highly respecting that person and try to debate and argue? I guess, judging by your comment, I'd say you just might. Well, I couldn't do it so easily.
Afaik, Planck didn't use the exact wording (someone simplified it into that, but it's not the literal quote), and it would be huffy of me to even categorize my brief conversation with Rich in that way. Who knows, if I had more time, I could maybe convince him to try to be less skeptical about LLMs. He's not a dogmatist; he's very practical, and things explained pragmatically can change his stance about anything.
In the 1960s there was recognition of some of the implications of
human intelligence. I. J. Good wrote [10]:
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine
that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any
any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of
these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could
design even better machines; there would then unquestionably
be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man
would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent
machine is the _last_ invention that man need ever make,
provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to
keep it under control.
...
It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century,
an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be
the last invention that man need make.
Good has captured the essence of the runaway, but does not pursue
its most disturbing consequences. Any intelligent machine of the sort
he describes would not be humankind's "tool" -- any more than humans
are the tools of rabbits or robins or chimpanzees.
Don't think that's at all what the article in question is discussing, but this was interesting.
The assumption I need to challenge is that "an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines".
That assumes that better machines are even possible, that there's no point of bottleneck that cannot be broken, or that they are so much more intelligent than us that they too won't hit a limit pretty quickly to what they can figure out.
It also says it surpasses any man however clever, but doesn't say it can surpass the totality of man interacting and building on each other's. If you take the most clever of all man, they are not so clever as to surpass humanity's total ingenuity and invention. And it's not a given that this super intelligent machine, more clever than any one man, is able to replicate itself and work in tandem with copies of itself in a way that is as effective as how humans somehow form a dynamic system between themselves.
Lastly, and I know the premise assumes it's better at everything, including at building intelligent machines, but I think an ultra-intelligent machine could exist that struggles at building better machines. Depending on your faith, we might be the construction of lesser intelligent organisms eventually discovering and evolving into us, and yet we do not yet understand how to make a more intelligent human.
> The assumption I need to challenge is that "an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines".
Would you bet your life, and everyone else's, to test that assumption?
Not to mention: you can scale up performance in simple ways: more data, more compute, and more weights. Those are the obvious ones, ignoring architectural changes.
Hickey is being a bit narrow sighted here, and ignoring some of the ways that humans are using AI outside of coding.
I’m someone that is, and has been, for most of my career, someone from the in-between lands. I don’t use paper maps from the gas station, but I have not coded much.
I basically grew up with DOS 1.0 and on. Often made a living being able to sit at a Windows workstation and think and persist so I could figure out in four hours what other people could not, in that buggy strange world of microcomputers many of us grew up in.
Those situations, now, often take me five minutes to get past, instead of four hours. It has been a game changer for me.
Heres another view. A tool is something you buy or use to accomplish a task. Its a commodity everyone buys a hammer to bang in those nails. AI is the same here, everybody thinks they are developing a new calendar app, they are actually developing the SAME calendar app. The person didnt actually develop anything they simply used the tool to accomplish the same goal.
The creativity and skill of the craftsman is gone. Craftsman/woman create new and unique or different things because they understand the problems or goals and create.
THe people using AI mostly dont know the basics of software and tahts part of the problem why we see really dumb mistakes, like little or no security.
Yes, a bit of a thought bicycle, as Jobs envisioned computers - perhaps more than a bicycle though because the cognition is not limited to my own powers but also the distilled powers of past men.
A ghost bicycle?
I figure it still requires someone who can pedal and knows where they want to go before you get anywhere useful, and perhaps that slightly aligns with Hickey's point. But on the whole I feel like Hickey is arguing about the meaning of words, which is shrug-worthy.
I love Rich Hickey's speeches, and found this entertaining, but it seems pretty pedantic.
I mean, I guess there's a lot of people that don't know the difference in what he's saying.
`rm` is a tool. You don't tell `rm` to delete things and then get annoyed when it deletes your production database because it inferred incorrectly.
It does what you tell it. Like a hammer hits what you hit with it.
`claude` can be considered a version of `rm` that can do what `rm` does (and other things - including things you don't want). Nearly everyone using it is aware of that.
An employee is not a `tool`.
`claude` is closer to an employee. You tell it to do things. It costs you money. Sometimes you get what you wanted, sometimes you get something far better, sometimes you get literally nothing, other times you get disaster (more often with `claude` than with a good employee).
That's why they call it an `agent`, not a `tool`.
Employers don't throw up their hands and say, no thanks, I'll do everything myself with `tool`s. They say, I'll try to learn how to better manage employees which are useful to further my goals (along with tools - because both are useful).
Not every person runs a business. Maybe in the future most people won't be using AI at all. Some people definitely will.
I'm not sure why we needed to go on this pedantic ride.
When people say "AI is just a tool", I think they mostly know what they mean and we all do, too.
In the vein of these 2 minutes of Guy Steele's talk on Fortress (How to think about parallel programming: Not! https://youtu.be/dPK6t7echuA?si=huyI3LR8LVaB6Yen&t=1589) I think that the real thing here is "do not hide what is important nor obscure that which ought to belong to the user". The question is (as always) "what is important"?
And I think that the "tool" vs. "automation" delineation is one of the clearest and most succinct takes on _how to talk about this problem_ that I have seen in the past few years.
It's a useful piece because it shows how considering AI a tool is nothing but lying to yourself.
If you shipped something understanding none of it, you did nothing. Claude did it. Writing 'code' is not just typing characters that compile, it's maintaining a system of ideas. If you don't know anything about those underlying ideas, what did you even do? How are you not trivially replaceable?
You can argue all day about these topics, but ultimately, the paychecks, the customers, the prestige, etc will be proportional to the non-AI value that you can offer to the world.
Shipping code is more than just writing the code. Just writing code is far from the be all and end all of making something, and there are already many books written on the subject already. Now, just throwing the result of a oneshot prompt over the wall isn't contributing much but we've long recognized that a useful piece of software is much more than just the effort of writing out the code.
I agree 100% to what Rich has to say here, especially because, as Rich always writes, he goes to the dictionary to find correct definitions to support his argument. But I think this is a lost battle, because there is always going to be the camp of people of "BuT lAnGuAgEs EvOlVe".
Yes, Janet, languages do evolve. But why do you think dictionaries exists? Solely for teaching purposes? No, it is because at the end of the day, sometimes there is a need for a correct definition to establish a foundation for some argument of some kind.
But I know people are going to ignore and simply say his arguments have no validity.
A shame, beause in this he actually wrote a very clear separation of software that is a tool and aoftware that is automation. And he didn't even say AI is bad or any other thing. He simply says: AI is automation, not a tool. Use accordingly
They do and they don’t, depending on what (and who) you’re talking about and whether or not it’s beneficial to say language evolves or not in that particular argument :)
> I agree 100% to what Rich has to say here, especially because, as Rich always writes, he goes to the dictionary to find correct definitions to support his argument.
I don't know why you think that's so effective a way of getting at the truth. Whether something is a tool or not is a matter of family resemblances and is not susceptible to proof or disproof. Id recommend that Hickey put down the dictionary and pick up Wittgenstein.
Hickey is not leaning on the dictionary. The specific definitions he lays out for tool and automation make up his argument, not the words themselves. Saying "no, tool can be these other things" misses the point by a considerable distance.
So he's stipulating a definition of the word and then saying LLMs don't meet it. A more truthful title would be, "LLMs are not tools in my narrower, idiosyncratic sense of the word." Fine, but so what?
> Control, sensory feedback, intention, intimacy, continuous direction, expertise etc are all missing from LLM use. LLMs are not wielded. LLMs are automation.
Cameras do indeed have sensory feedback, intention, intimacy, contentious direction, expertise, etc. So TFA would indeed describe a camera as a tool, not as automation.
Note also that TFA is not romanticizing effort, rather it is putting value to expertise:
> The continuous application of technique and energy, and sensory feedback, are essential to the buildup of expertise.
a semantics discussion but I think it would be fair to call them "indeterministic tools" and there are other tools that are indeterministic besides LLMs
People try to wrangle the indeterministic outputs through deterministic layers to convert the indeterminism to something determined
I don't think he's trying to make a semantic discussion.
He's trying to unpack various qualities: learning potential, reliability, predictability, tactile feedback, simple construction, etc. Then goes to define tools as those things that have these set of qualities, and automation as those that have these other set of qualities: it does something for you, takes the practice, learning and details away from you, harder to control and can get derailed, etc.
In some of his comment replies, he even says there's a spectrum from tool to automation, because he's focusing on those qualities more so than on the semantics.
no, I think he's quite right to say that there is no such thing as an indeterministic tool. As he says, what defines tool use is precision, mastery and intentionality.
One wields a tool, but you cannot wield a set of dice or a slot machine, a chatbot, or a call center worker. That's not tool use, that's outsourcing or delegation of work. If I play Claude, or I pay a salary worker somewhere else, I have ceased to work, my skills are going to atrophy, my knowledge and my control is, the opposite of what genuine tool mastery implies.
If something's a tool, the more you use it, the more you improve not just narrowly mind you, but in all your faculties. Using an LLM has the exact opposite effect. At best you improve at only one thing, typing text into the LLM, while you atrophy everything else.
The logical terminus of the habitual LLM user, and that is really why 'industry leaders' love them so much, is the worker becoming a Tayloresque factory ape doing nothing but pushing the same button over and over again.
Opinion pieces on AI have been getting a ton of engagement and bring out a very emotional crowd. It feels very "Reddit" lately, and ironically I find /r/localllama to be better at engaging the technology itself than descending into political flamewars.
"All told, a monad in X is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors of X, with product × replaced by composition of endofunctors and unit set by the identity endofunctor."
Agentic AIs (what he's talking about) are agents, obviously; you set the goal, they decide the means. Traditional programs are automation. Totally different, qualitatively.
Is a query planner an agent? (It might be, I'm not sure semantically the "agent" vs. "automation" distinction will aid as much in the discussion as "tool" vs. "automation", but I'm open to being completely off base here).
Aww shucks, it sucks to see folks you admire get old and age out with tech. I see where Rich is coming from, but AI is a tool, as well as an automation.
By his definition, we could argue that a catapult or bow and arrow are not tools or perhaps it's based on the user, many people will not find them predictable and reliable without serious practice. Likewise the same with LLM
> Aww shucks, it sucks to see folks you admire get old and age out with tech.
The vast majority of the time, old people whom the young think are "out of touch" are actually speaking from hard-won experience. Ignore them at your peril, because they are usually correct and the young are usually wrong.
Every generation thinks they figured things out and the youngsters should listen to them this time. It never happens and it's probably a good thing. I don't think any age range has a monopoly on being right or wrong, just different biases.
By his definition, we could argue that a catapult or bow and arrow are not tools
Uh no, not based on his definition. Catapult and bows are simple. You can evaluate the result of using these tool instantly, and the corresponding adjustment is something you have to make, because you are wielding the tool. This is what he means by "wielding".
Compare and contrast with complaining to an LLM that "the margins look wrong".
Via LinkedIn (ai-tool-rich-hickey-kjl8e) but I suspect that we're rate limiting slop from there. Mods, feel free to swap out the original link if I was just-wrong about that.
I've reset the link in keeping with HN's preference for original sources, but given that linkedin.com is a banned domain on HN, what you did was fine. I've put the gist link in the toptext as well.
Both belong to Microsoft anyway. They should know how to optimally get their shit together - it's not our problem. People be spreading shit all over - that's the general idea of the Internet.
Sorry, Dan. I don't come here to read stereotypical LinkedIn essays. To the extent AI emits slop, LinkedIn is where it learned how. Sometimes a shallow dismissal is just what the situation calls for.
HN's value lies largely in the audience its posts attract. Think about what you want the site to be. It isn't this. Or at least, it wasn't.
Sorry to disappoint your dissidence, but the article was flagged by users and we've turned off the flags now, which means it's back on the frontpage, not being repressed!
Huge respect for Rich Hickey, and anything he says is worth thinking deeply about.
That said, I think this particular semantic distinction is something we need to think about more from a political perspective than a semantic precision perspective. A tool is something that humans (or animals, or other entities) control for their own purposes. It's important that AI remain a tool of humanity to serve human purposes, following human accountabilities. Because the alternative narrative is that AI is a super-intelligence with it's own agency which we can not control, and while it may make a small handful of individuals incredibly wealthy beyond their wildest dreams, they can't be held accountable because AI has its own agency.
The word "tool" is obviously very old and carries tons of connotation shaped by the world of the past. AI clearly challenges a ton of assumptions about what "tool" and many other words mean. Therefore, while I understand Hickey's point, I think for the sake of our civilization and the moral hazard we are facing, it's better that we consider AI a tool versus whatever narrative the AI cultists are cooking up.
LLM's exist on a vast gradient of "toolness -> agent". Humans exist on that spectrum too.
For example, a human isn't a "tool", but one serves a similar role as a tool if their job/task is well defined enough. If you're a conductor, you can view the various members of your orchestra as "tools" to produce the ideal musical output. Of course they have autonomy, they could choose to not play at all, jump into the audience and destroy their instruments, but in all likelihood they won't.
LLM's could be tools in the sense that you have a well defined task, such as "identify all facts relevant to this case from these 1000 legal documents), and 9 times out of 10 it gives you essentially what you want. That same LLM could choose to write a poem, or hack into a state government website if it wanted, but its "wants" are unpredictable and hard to specify (same as a human's) but you can still expect it to do what it should do the vast majority of the time.
That being said, the smarter an LLM gets, the more its wants are disconnected from its tasks, the "self-awareness" factor (which isn't to say LLM's are conscious, but they can portray all the verifiable elements of self-awareness, metacognition, etc), the more you have to grapple with the depth of their thinking between the input and output.
Is it sane we are speeding towards this? Who knows, maybe AI can be aligned better than humans, but if AI can't be aligned as well as humans, we can look at human history to see what happens when you can't simply order a person around like a tool and expect a certain output.
Yes, Rich says so explicitly as his reply to a comment:
> Rich Hickey: Toolness is a spectrum. The more using a thing is like ordering a sandwich, the less it is a tool. And yes, cars are decreasingly tools.
How about this, if you're using an agentic AI as a tool, be careful as it may stop being a tool.
> How about this, if you're using an agentic AI as a tool, be careful as it may stop being a tool.
Even more importantly, you maybe become its tool.
> If you're a conductor, you can view the various members of your orchestra as "tools" to produce the ideal musical output.
I disagree, humans are the operators, tools are tools. Operators use tools. A conductor is an operator that uses a baton tool to direct other operators to produce the proper sound with their musical instrument tools.
I think calling people tools is dehumanizing if anything. The only way I know people can be a tool, is through an already existing insult.
As always when discussing the usage of English words, it's pleasing to look at Webster's 1913 dictionary, which helpfully includes this definition of "tool":
> A person used as an instrument by another person; -- a word of reproach; as, men of intrigue have their tools, by whose agency they accomplish their purposes.
Okay but how is it used in society? I don’t know many people who refer to Websters. Notice your Webster’s doesn’t include the insult usage.
I see your Websters and raise you Urban Dictionary:
> That guy who makes us shake our head in disbelief but at the same time makes us feel better about ourselves since we are not him.
Please consider social and modern day usage as well when discussing English words.
Also 1913? Wow.
I'm trying in vain to find any indication in your comment that you read more than the headline.
Sure. You can stretch the word "tool" to mean anything, but here, Hickey is using the words "tool" and "automation" to describe specific things. He defines each word precisely, for the purpose of the points he's making.I think Rich's comment reply here explains the post:
> Commenter: Well, this was a twitter-like controversial clickbait but I will say it anyway. LLM is a tool. To be more specific, it's a lossy knowledge base with a human language for querying and built-in summarization.
> Rich Hickey: Agreed. I'm talking about its embodiment in conversational systems purporting to be 'tools' for doing homework, research, coding, writing etc.
With that framing in mind, the article makes a lot of sense. AI agents are not tools for coding, they automate coding, which means you lose control, learning, predictability, etc.
In and of itself, an AI agent is a tool, can be used for things, like say making software, but if thinking of it as a tool for coding, that appears wrong, as using one changes the modality of the task, you are not coding using a tool, the coding is no longer done by you and has been automated.
As he also says, reading an AI summary of a paper is a different modality from using it to read the entirety of a paper, therefore it is not a tool for reading the way a Kindle, glasses, reader-mode are. And similar to with coding, you've lost things from automating the reading, that reading just a summary does not provide.
I had a chance to ask Rich about the subject at the latest Conj. I admit, my question was too vague, I asked him: "what are your thoughts on how AI is reshaping our industry?", to which he vaguely replied that he's "not participating in this [experiment]", he admitted that he hasn't explored LLMs too deeply and he simply thinks they are not good, not to mention tons of other concerns - moral, economic, etc. I said, "well, I wish I had the luxury to choose, but many of us have no choice here, we're simply forced to use the darn thing..."
It is very difficult to disagree with anyone of the caliber such as this man, but I wanted to steer the conversation away from the generative aspect of LLMs and focus on the consumption side, because frankly, these "tools", and I think even though I might agree with Rich that LLMs by themselves are not tools, the harness I built to work with them definitely is one. I think there's an immense value there, way before you even start talking about code-generation, or code at all. I think I have failed to explain my points, because a talk we both wanted to see was about to start.
> it's very difficult to disagree with anyone of the caliber of this man
Did you seriously write this with a straight face?
Or really? I can ask you the same question about your very comment. How often do you travel to a conference that's been held for almost 20 years, face the person founded the entire "ethos" - the whole reason for that conference, stand in a circle of people highly respecting that person and try to debate and argue? I guess, judging by your comment, I'd say you just might. Well, I couldn't do it so easily.
I agree with how you handled the situation and this comment.
Though, it makes me think of the quote "Science advances one funeral at a time" - Max Planck
Afaik, Planck didn't use the exact wording (someone simplified it into that, but it's not the literal quote), and it would be huffy of me to even categorize my brief conversation with Rich in that way. Who knows, if I had more time, I could maybe convince him to try to be less skeptical about LLMs. He's not a dogmatist; he's very practical, and things explained pragmatically can change his stance about anything.
https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html
Don't think that's at all what the article in question is discussing, but this was interesting.
The assumption I need to challenge is that "an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines".
That assumes that better machines are even possible, that there's no point of bottleneck that cannot be broken, or that they are so much more intelligent than us that they too won't hit a limit pretty quickly to what they can figure out.
It also says it surpasses any man however clever, but doesn't say it can surpass the totality of man interacting and building on each other's. If you take the most clever of all man, they are not so clever as to surpass humanity's total ingenuity and invention. And it's not a given that this super intelligent machine, more clever than any one man, is able to replicate itself and work in tandem with copies of itself in a way that is as effective as how humans somehow form a dynamic system between themselves.
Lastly, and I know the premise assumes it's better at everything, including at building intelligent machines, but I think an ultra-intelligent machine could exist that struggles at building better machines. Depending on your faith, we might be the construction of lesser intelligent organisms eventually discovering and evolving into us, and yet we do not yet understand how to make a more intelligent human.
> The assumption I need to challenge is that "an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines".
Would you bet your life, and everyone else's, to test that assumption?
Not to mention: you can scale up performance in simple ways: more data, more compute, and more weights. Those are the obvious ones, ignoring architectural changes.
Rich Hickey's flair for words not withstanding, I believe he is right on this.
It is like saying that a lathe is not a tool. Technically true, the tool is just the cutting part, not the whole machine.
But does it matter outside of the shop? It's the thing the machinist uses to make stuff, so, for all intent and purposes, a tool.
Author’s definition of tool feels too narrow. What about tools of the mind?
Hickey is being a bit narrow sighted here, and ignoring some of the ways that humans are using AI outside of coding.
I’m someone that is, and has been, for most of my career, someone from the in-between lands. I don’t use paper maps from the gas station, but I have not coded much.
I basically grew up with DOS 1.0 and on. Often made a living being able to sit at a Windows workstation and think and persist so I could figure out in four hours what other people could not, in that buggy strange world of microcomputers many of us grew up in.
Those situations, now, often take me five minutes to get past, instead of four hours. It has been a game changer for me.
Heres another view. A tool is something you buy or use to accomplish a task. Its a commodity everyone buys a hammer to bang in those nails. AI is the same here, everybody thinks they are developing a new calendar app, they are actually developing the SAME calendar app. The person didnt actually develop anything they simply used the tool to accomplish the same goal.
The creativity and skill of the craftsman is gone. Craftsman/woman create new and unique or different things because they understand the problems or goals and create.
THe people using AI mostly dont know the basics of software and tahts part of the problem why we see really dumb mistakes, like little or no security.
Yes, a bit of a thought bicycle, as Jobs envisioned computers - perhaps more than a bicycle though because the cognition is not limited to my own powers but also the distilled powers of past men.
A ghost bicycle?
I figure it still requires someone who can pedal and knows where they want to go before you get anywhere useful, and perhaps that slightly aligns with Hickey's point. But on the whole I feel like Hickey is arguing about the meaning of words, which is shrug-worthy.
Ivan Illich makes a similar argument in Tools for Conviviality (1973) where he distinguishes tools you work with versus tools that work for you.
I love Rich Hickey's speeches, and found this entertaining, but it seems pretty pedantic.
I mean, I guess there's a lot of people that don't know the difference in what he's saying.
`rm` is a tool. You don't tell `rm` to delete things and then get annoyed when it deletes your production database because it inferred incorrectly.
It does what you tell it. Like a hammer hits what you hit with it.
`claude` can be considered a version of `rm` that can do what `rm` does (and other things - including things you don't want). Nearly everyone using it is aware of that.
An employee is not a `tool`.
`claude` is closer to an employee. You tell it to do things. It costs you money. Sometimes you get what you wanted, sometimes you get something far better, sometimes you get literally nothing, other times you get disaster (more often with `claude` than with a good employee).
That's why they call it an `agent`, not a `tool`.
Employers don't throw up their hands and say, no thanks, I'll do everything myself with `tool`s. They say, I'll try to learn how to better manage employees which are useful to further my goals (along with tools - because both are useful).
Not every person runs a business. Maybe in the future most people won't be using AI at all. Some people definitely will.
I'm not sure why we needed to go on this pedantic ride.
When people say "AI is just a tool", I think they mostly know what they mean and we all do, too.
In the vein of these 2 minutes of Guy Steele's talk on Fortress (How to think about parallel programming: Not! https://youtu.be/dPK6t7echuA?si=huyI3LR8LVaB6Yen&t=1589) I think that the real thing here is "do not hide what is important nor obscure that which ought to belong to the user". The question is (as always) "what is important"?
And I think that the "tool" vs. "automation" delineation is one of the clearest and most succinct takes on _how to talk about this problem_ that I have seen in the past few years.
Is car a tool?
- because car companies are definitely misaligned with their customers
It's a useful piece because it shows how considering AI a tool is nothing but lying to yourself.
If you shipped something understanding none of it, you did nothing. Claude did it. Writing 'code' is not just typing characters that compile, it's maintaining a system of ideas. If you don't know anything about those underlying ideas, what did you even do? How are you not trivially replaceable?
You can argue all day about these topics, but ultimately, the paychecks, the customers, the prestige, etc will be proportional to the non-AI value that you can offer to the world.
Shipping code is more than just writing the code. Just writing code is far from the be all and end all of making something, and there are already many books written on the subject already. Now, just throwing the result of a oneshot prompt over the wall isn't contributing much but we've long recognized that a useful piece of software is much more than just the effort of writing out the code.
I agree 100% to what Rich has to say here, especially because, as Rich always writes, he goes to the dictionary to find correct definitions to support his argument. But I think this is a lost battle, because there is always going to be the camp of people of "BuT lAnGuAgEs EvOlVe".
Yes, Janet, languages do evolve. But why do you think dictionaries exists? Solely for teaching purposes? No, it is because at the end of the day, sometimes there is a need for a correct definition to establish a foundation for some argument of some kind.
But I know people are going to ignore and simply say his arguments have no validity.
A shame, beause in this he actually wrote a very clear separation of software that is a tool and aoftware that is automation. And he didn't even say AI is bad or any other thing. He simply says: AI is automation, not a tool. Use accordingly
> "BuT lAnGuAgEs EvOlVe"
They do and they don’t, depending on what (and who) you’re talking about and whether or not it’s beneficial to say language evolves or not in that particular argument :)
> I agree 100% to what Rich has to say here, especially because, as Rich always writes, he goes to the dictionary to find correct definitions to support his argument.
I don't know why you think that's so effective a way of getting at the truth. Whether something is a tool or not is a matter of family resemblances and is not susceptible to proof or disproof. Id recommend that Hickey put down the dictionary and pick up Wittgenstein.
Hickey is not leaning on the dictionary. The specific definitions he lays out for tool and automation make up his argument, not the words themselves. Saying "no, tool can be these other things" misses the point by a considerable distance.
So he's stipulating a definition of the word and then saying LLMs don't meet it. A more truthful title would be, "LLMs are not tools in my narrower, idiosyncratic sense of the word." Fine, but so what?
Do you consider a camera an automation and not a tool? This type of romanticing of effort is a tired old debate that has not aged well...
Reminds me of Baudelaire:
"the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies"
I think a camera is an excellent tool for producing photographs. It is a shitty tool for becoming a better painter.
Explained in TFA.
> A tool is something you wield.
> Control, sensory feedback, intention, intimacy, continuous direction, expertise etc are all missing from LLM use. LLMs are not wielded. LLMs are automation.
Cameras do indeed have sensory feedback, intention, intimacy, contentious direction, expertise, etc. So TFA would indeed describe a camera as a tool, not as automation.
Note also that TFA is not romanticizing effort, rather it is putting value to expertise:
> The continuous application of technique and energy, and sensory feedback, are essential to the buildup of expertise.
Yeah I mean a camera pretty precisely fits his definition of a tool. Not sure what your point is here.
Semantics, ok, they are "assistants" that can go rogue, escape confinement, etc.
And they are a hell of a useful "assistant"
It's not just semantics, because a lot of people (especially here on HN) claim that AI is just a tool to promote its usage.
a semantics discussion but I think it would be fair to call them "indeterministic tools" and there are other tools that are indeterministic besides LLMs
People try to wrangle the indeterministic outputs through deterministic layers to convert the indeterminism to something determined
I don't think he's trying to make a semantic discussion.
He's trying to unpack various qualities: learning potential, reliability, predictability, tactile feedback, simple construction, etc. Then goes to define tools as those things that have these set of qualities, and automation as those that have these other set of qualities: it does something for you, takes the practice, learning and details away from you, harder to control and can get derailed, etc.
In some of his comment replies, he even says there's a spectrum from tool to automation, because he's focusing on those qualities more so than on the semantics.
no, I think he's quite right to say that there is no such thing as an indeterministic tool. As he says, what defines tool use is precision, mastery and intentionality.
One wields a tool, but you cannot wield a set of dice or a slot machine, a chatbot, or a call center worker. That's not tool use, that's outsourcing or delegation of work. If I play Claude, or I pay a salary worker somewhere else, I have ceased to work, my skills are going to atrophy, my knowledge and my control is, the opposite of what genuine tool mastery implies.
If something's a tool, the more you use it, the more you improve not just narrowly mind you, but in all your faculties. Using an LLM has the exact opposite effect. At best you improve at only one thing, typing text into the LLM, while you atrophy everything else.
The logical terminus of the habitual LLM user, and that is really why 'industry leaders' love them so much, is the worker becoming a Tayloresque factory ape doing nothing but pushing the same button over and over again.
How would people wrangle indeterministic outputs through deterministic layers?
You can multiply /dev/random for how many (non-zero) constants you like, but the result will stay just as random
Whether you agree with him or not, this is a wild post to be flagged.
Opinion pieces on AI have been getting a ton of engagement and bring out a very emotional crowd. It feels very "Reddit" lately, and ironically I find /r/localllama to be better at engaging the technology itself than descending into political flamewars.
AI, as it currently exists in the marketplace, is used, engaged, and distributed to be a tool.
"AI" as it was known until ~2023 could also be useful as an algorithmic implementation to solve an objective.
Now that definition is squishy, but still relevant.
The main thing I'm taking from this article is that (editiorialized) "AI is a tool like a drive-through is a tool for cooking."
Why are you a tool?
Who says I'm a tool?
You are a tool.
"All told, a monad in X is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors of X, with product × replaced by composition of endofunctors and unit set by the identity endofunctor."
Agentic AIs (what he's talking about) are agents, obviously; you set the goal, they decide the means. Traditional programs are automation. Totally different, qualitatively.
Is a query planner an agent? (It might be, I'm not sure semantically the "agent" vs. "automation" distinction will aid as much in the discussion as "tool" vs. "automation", but I'm open to being completely off base here).
Software has been called tools for decades. He author is going against the grain of the regular usage of the word.
LLMs are not normal software
And, every single software you know is a tool?
So gdb isn’t a tool then. Huh, that seems odd.
AI is only a tool, it isn’t anything more than that. I use AI because work pays for an expensive subscription, and I’ve found it helpful… as a tool.
I generally don't agree with the framing in the gist, but I'm not sure where you are getting that the author wouldn't consider gdb to be a tool
Aww shucks, it sucks to see folks you admire get old and age out with tech. I see where Rich is coming from, but AI is a tool, as well as an automation.
By his definition, we could argue that a catapult or bow and arrow are not tools or perhaps it's based on the user, many people will not find them predictable and reliable without serious practice. Likewise the same with LLM
From your profile you are "I'm all in on GenAI", could this be clouding what advice you find useful?
> Aww shucks, it sucks to see folks you admire get old and age out with tech.
The vast majority of the time, old people whom the young think are "out of touch" are actually speaking from hard-won experience. Ignore them at your peril, because they are usually correct and the young are usually wrong.
Every generation thinks they figured things out and the youngsters should listen to them this time. It never happens and it's probably a good thing. I don't think any age range has a monopoly on being right or wrong, just different biases.
Old age and treachery beat youth and skill every time:
https://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/old-age-and-treachery....
On the other hand I’m glad to be on the same side as people I admire like Gary Marcus, Rich Hickey, and Cal Newport
Compare and contrast with complaining to an LLM that "the margins look wrong".
Disgusting sentiment. Be better than that.
Can the people who flagged this explain why?
Thanks dang ;)
Via LinkedIn (ai-tool-rich-hickey-kjl8e) but I suspect that we're rate limiting slop from there. Mods, feel free to swap out the original link if I was just-wrong about that.
I've reset the link in keeping with HN's preference for original sources, but given that linkedin.com is a banned domain on HN, what you did was fine. I've put the gist link in the toptext as well.
I for one am happier to read a gist than linkedin.
Both belong to Microsoft anyway. They should know how to optimally get their shit together - it's not our problem. People be spreading shit all over - that's the general idea of the Internet.
[flagged]
You broke quite a few of HN's guidelines with this. Please don't!
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50062384.)
Sorry, Dan. I don't come here to read stereotypical LinkedIn essays. To the extent AI emits slop, LinkedIn is where it learned how. Sometimes a shallow dismissal is just what the situation calls for.
HN's value lies largely in the audience its posts attract. Think about what you want the site to be. It isn't this. Or at least, it wasn't.
I can’t think of someone more worthy of the collective attention of HN than Rich Hickey.
> some guy I've never heard of
Life is too short to let who you've heard of define your values, and your statement says more about you than them...
I’ve used coding agaents and more than once in the chat I found myself saying: “oh no, why’d you do that? you are such a tool!” so that’s it!
[flagged]
Thankfully reputation is something earned.
Sorry to disappoint your dissidence, but the article was flagged by users and we've turned off the flags now, which means it's back on the frontpage, not being repressed!