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But for me the biggest issue with all this — that I don't see covered in here, or maybe just a little bit in passing — is what all of this is doing to beginners, and the learning pipeline.

> There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge that vaguely resembles it. That isn’t programming, though.

> I glimpsed someone on Twitter a few days ago, also scoffing at the idea that anyone would decide not to use the Whatever machine. I can’t remember exactly what they said, but it was something like: “I created a whole album, complete with album art, in 3.5 hours. Why wouldn’t I use the make it easier machine?”

When you're a beginner, it's totally normal to not really want to put in the hard work. You try drawing a picture, and it sucks. You try playing the guitar, and you can't even get simple notes right. Of course a machine where you can just say "a picture in the style of Pokémon, but of my cat" and get a perfect result out is much more tempting to a 12 year old kid than the prospect of having to grind for 5 years before being kind of good.

But up until now, you had no choice and to keep making crappy pictures and playing crappy songs until you actually start to develop a taste for the effort, and a few years later you find yourself actually pretty darn competent at the thing. That's a pretty virtuous cycle.

I shudder to think where we'll be if the corporate-media machine keeps hammering the message "you don't have to bother learning how to draw, drawing is hard, just get ChatGPT to draw pictures for you" to young people for years to come.

I have not yet figured out why anyone would choose this behaviour in a text editor. You have to press something to exit the delimited region anyway, whether that be an arrow key or the closing delimiter, so just… why did the first person even invent the idea, which just complicates things and also makes it harder to model the editor’s behaviour mentally? Were they a hunt-and-peck typist or something?

In theory, it helps keep your source valid syntax more of the time, which may help with syntax highlighting (especially of strings) and LSP/similar tooling. But it’s only more of the time: your source will still be invalid frequently, including when it gets things wrong and you have to relocate a delimiter. In practice, I don’t think it’s useful on that ground.

Most of Internet is crap. Most of media is crap. This does need to stop you (or me) from creating.

Same with AI. I'm notably more autistic (or more aspie, or whatever) than my friend group, and also I much more easily recognize AI text and images as uncanny slop, while my friends are more easily wowed by it. Maybe AI output has the same "superficially impressive but empty inside" quality as the stuff that sociopaths say.

This drives me mad in JetBrains' products mostly because there are about 14 ways to completely disable it (including Rider, which is different to the others). There should be a single toggle for "Disable all 'smart' completions"

one of these things is not like the other

I agree with the author, I usually do not care how exactly the fetch call looks like. Whatever indeed.

The last line of the article summarizes it perfectly.:

> Do things. Make things. And then put them on your website so I can see them.

I subscribe fully to the first two sentences, but the last one is bullshit. The gloom in the article is born from the authors attaching the value of "making things" to the recognition received for the effort. Put your stuff out there if you think it is of value to someone else. If it is, cool, and if it's not, well, who cares.

> I can’t remember exactly what they said, but it was something like: “I created a whole album, complete with album art, in 3.5 hours. Why wouldn’t I use the make it easier machine?” This is kind of darkly fascinating to me, because it gives rise to such an obvious question: if anyone can do that, then why listen to your music? It takes a significant chunk of 3.5 hours just to listen to an album, so how much manual work was even done here? Apparently I can just go generate an endless stream of stuff of the same quality! Why would I want your particular brand of Whatever?

This gem implies that the value of the music (or art in general) is partially or even wholly dependent on whether or not someone else thinks it's good. I can't even...

If you eliminate the back-patting requirements, and the stuff we make is genuine, then it's value is intrinsic. The "Whatever" machines are just tools, like the rest of the tools we use, to make things. So, just make your things and get on with it.

I'm a bit annoyed with LLMs for coding, because I care about the craft. But I understand the premise of using them when the end goal is not "tech as a craft" but "tech as a means". But that still requires having some reason to use the tech.

Hell, I feel the "tech as a means to get money" part for people trying to climb up the social ladder.

But for a lot of people who already did get to the top of it?

At some point we gotta ask what the point of SEO-optimizing everything even is.

Like, is the end goal optimizing life out of life?

Why not write a whole app using LLMs? Why not have the LLM do your course work? Why do the course work at all? Why not have the LLM make a birthday card for your partner? Why even get up in the morning? Why not just go leave and live in a forest? Why live at all?

What is even the point?

Oh come on. As someone who works with plenty of entrepeneurs, you don't get much more enthusiasm from anyone about what they are doing than them, who care about it as much. It's up there with professional sports and professional artists.

Just because things didn't get built that were the absolute dream of what things could be, doesn't mean people didn't care and didn't put in all their efforts to build things. Just because they didn't meet this couch critic's expectations doesn't mean people didn't put the effort in.

I really don't like this attitude. He's really unhappy about paypal and stripe existing? What exactly is the alternative? What alternate universe are they dreaming about? Perfection doesn't exist.

> Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.

The reaction to that post has been interesting. It's mainly intended to be an argument against the LLM hype! I'm pushing back against all the people who are saying "LLMs are so incredible at programming that nobody should consider programming as a career any more" - I think that's total nonsense, like a carpenter quitting because someone invented the table saw.

Analogies like this will inevitably get people hung up on the details of the analogy though. Lots of people jumped straight to "a table saw does a single job reliably, unlike LLMs which are non-deterministic".

I picked table saws because they are actually really dangerous and can cut your thumb off if you don't know how to use them.

And I'm not the only one saying this but - the bit about LLMs is likely throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Yes the "AI-ification" of everything is horrible and people are shoehorning it into places where it's not useful. But to say that every single LLM interaction is wrong/not useful is just not true (though it might be true if you limit yourself to only freely available models!). Using LLMs effectively is a skill in itself, and not one to be underestimated. Just because you failed to get it to do something it's not well-suited to doesn't mean it can't do anything at all.

Though the conclusion (do things, make things) I do agree with anyway.

I can absolutely relate. That was ten years ago, so I'm not exactly sure where they are, now, but they still seem to be going strong.

[0] https://eev.ee/blog/2015/06/09/i-quit-the-tech-industry/

Do you realize how many person-hour of highly intelligent people have been spent on ORM just so people could not learn SQL? Most people don't value learning.

In the past ten years, I worked with one guy from Nigeria and a bunch of people from Iran. Bitcoin (or rather cryptocurrencies in general) have been more than just mere gimmicks.

Sending money from one side of the world to another, for such a low fees, even when the central bank of Nigeria is blocking USD transfers, even when bank transfers to Iran are being blocked, has been very useful in itself.

As for AI, yes if you use it as a God, you will be disappointed. Yes it can’t do everything. Yes it will hallucinate.

But it’s been a great learning environment for me, I keep asking questions to get an overview of things.

I used to learn concepts such as « clean architecture » because AI is never tired, it can provide endless variations to the same problems, until you better understand the underlying principles and the recurring patterns.

When I work on a project, 20-30% is creative, cutting edge, never seen before. 70% is CRUD, necessary boilerplate.

I know what I am supposed to be doing, I can verify the result, double check the validity of it.

Why would I waste hours typing letters?

Do I rely on AI for everything? No I don’t.

But pretending it’s completely useless, is nonsensical.

Yes it’s just statistically inferring the next token, but it’s actually a very simple, powerful concept.

The bigger picture that I think too few people focus on is the desperation of it all. The slop machine is just the latest in tech's desperate attempt to recapture what they did in the 90's where they connected a chunk of the planet to the fucking internet at large. Of course, they forget the part where "buying pet food on the internet" doesn't mean we want to be in Zuckerberg's legless dystopic "metaverse" for fucking standup meetings. Even when we had SecondLife 20 years earlier (and I guess VRchat and friends today)

I think the only people that really know this are Nvidia and AMD. The same way the only people who made money in the California gold rush were the people selling pickaxes and supplies and all that. Nvidia's stock price soaring to the size of half the fucking planet like Nortel or Standard Oil before them.

But the dogfooding, good god the dogfooding that is already going on. It feels like that the majority of people have either resoundingly rejected using the slop machine, or, much more troubling for capital. Their uses of it simply aren't "profitable". In the same way that having a speaker on your kitchen counter you can ask "what's the weather today" doesn't actually make you any money but we're going to pretend because we manufactured billions of these fuckers and if we just grin and pretend the musical chairs won't stop just yet. Right? Right?

So you've got an unprofitable product that you dumped hundreds of billions of dollars into. The only thing you can do to stave off your own demise as a C-suite (for making the line not go up. Or, heaven forbid making the line go down) is to feed one end of your workforce into a woodchipper and shackle the remainder of them to the slop machine you bought by installing it on all their desks and demanding they use it so you can pretend your workforce is some order of magnitude more productive now. If you as a C-suite (somehow) come from a tech background you might even know, deep down. Where you push all those feelings down into that it's all a lie, a farce. A distraction for the forces of capital that are even bigger than you are. Unless you're someone like Intel and they push you out the door for not making the line go up fast enough, of course.

But the question I keep coming back to is if there'll ever be a point of reckoning. When does this money black hole escape confinement and suck all the players into oblivion with it? That's been the historic reality of everything from tulips to houses. Or has tech found a way to truly become so inescapable, so irredeemably beyond understanding that they've escaped financial reality for their own mistakes?

The irony of this rant next to the AI rant.

Progress is not uniformly distributed I guess.

Oh wow.

But chatgpt does help me work through some really difficult mathematical equations in newest research papers by adding intermediate steps. I can easily confirm when it gets them right and when not, as I do have some idea. It’s super useful.

If you are not able to make LLMs work for you at all, and complain about them on the internet, you are an old man yelling at clouds. The blog post devolves from an insightful viewpoint into a long sad ramble.

It’s 100% fine if you don’t want to use them yourself, but complaining to others gets tired quick.

-----

This is why I absolutely cannot fucking stand creative work being referred to as "content". "Content" is how you refer to the stuff on a website when you're designing the layout and don't know what actually goes on the page yet. "Content" is how you refer to the collection of odds and ends in your car's trunk. "Content" is what marketers call the stuff that goes around the ads.

"Content"... is Whatever.

-----

People, please don't think of yourself as "content consumers".

Still don't get it. LLM outputs are nondeterministic. LLMs invent APIs that don't exist. That's why you filter those outputs through agent constructions, which actually compile code. The nondeterminism of LLMs don't make your compiler nondeterministic.

All sorts of ways to knock LLM-generated code. Most I disagree with, all colorable. But this article is based on a model of LLM code generation from 6 months ago which is simply no longer true, and you can't gaslight your way back to Q1 2024.

Agree with the sense that we're at a weird moment though.

You do you, and I'll do me. Perhaps spend more time coding which you say you like to do and less time sneering at people who use different tools.

> Why would someone using a really cool tool that makes them more productive… feel compelled to sneer and get defensive at the mere suggestion that someone else isn’t doing the same?

It sounds like it is about people seeing others doing things in a way they view as inefficient or wrong, and then trying to help. "Sneer and get defensive" does not sound like trying to be helpful, but they probably would not describe themselves as sneering and getting defensive, either.

> I might have strong opinions about what code looks like, because I might have to read it, but why would I — why would anyone — have such an intense reaction to the hypothetical editor setup of a hypothetical stranger?

As above, but even closer to this particular question, see the editor war.

> But the Bitcoin people make more money if they can shame everyone else into buying more Bitcoin, so of course they’re gonna try to do it. What do programmers get out of this?

Apart from "helping" others, a benefit of promoting technologies one uses and prefers may be a wider user base, leading to a better support, proliferation of technologies they view as good and useful.

> We’ve never had a machine that can take almost any input and just do Whatever.

Well, there is Perl. It is a joke (the statement, not the language), but the previous points actually made me to think of programming languages with dynamic and weak typing, similarly allowing to pretend that some errors do not happen, at the cost of being less correct, and doing whatever when things go wrong. Ambiguities in natural languages come to mind, too.

> That means they aren’t even reading the words they claim as their own!

Both homework and online discussions featured that before LLMs, too. For instance, with people sometimes linking (not necessarily copying) materials to prove a point, but materials contradicting it. Carelessness, laziness, lack of motivation to spend time and effort, are all old things.

> I can’t imagine publishing a game with, say, Midjourney-generated art, even if it didn’t have uncanny otherworldly surfaces bleeding into each other. I would find that humiliating. But there are games on the Switch shop that do it.

I heard "AI-generated game" mentioned as a curiosity or a novelty, apparently making it a selling point. Same as with all the "AI-powered" stuff, before LLMs. There is much of that used for marketing: as block chaining and "big data" were added everywhere when those were hyped, and many silly things are similarly added into items outside of computing if they have a potential to sound cool at least to some (e.g., fad diets, audiophile hardware).

> But I think the core of what pisses me off is that selling this magic machine requires selling the idea that doing things is worthless.

This also sounds like yet another point in the clash between prevalent business requirements and more enthusiastic human aspirations. The economic and social systems, and cultures, probably have more to do with it than particular technologies. Pretty much any bureaucracy/corporate/enterprise-focused technologies tend to lessen the fun and enjoyment.

Values at times seem like a property of an extinct subspecies. Like being born with a tail.

> But yes, thanks: I was once offered this challenge when faced with a Ren’Py problem, so I grit my teeth and posed my question to some LLM. It confidently listed several related formatting tags that would solve my problem. One teeny tiny issue: those tags did not and had never existed. Just about anything might be plausible! It can just generate Whatever! I cannot stress enough that this is worse than useless to me.

The probabilistic machine generated a probabilistic answer. Unable to figure out a use for the probabilistic machine in two tries, I threw it into the garbage.

Unfortunately, humans are also probabilistic machines. Despite speaking English for nearly a lifetime, errors are constantly produced by my finger-based output streams. So I'm okay talking to the machine that might be wrong in addition to the human that might be wrong.

> It feels like the same attitude that happened with Bitcoin, the same smug nose-wrinkling contempt. Bitcoin is the future. It’ll replace the dollar by 2020. You’re gonna be left behind. Enjoy being poor.

I mean, you were left behind. I was left behind. I am not enjoying being poor. Most of us were left behind. If we invested in Bitcoin like it was the future in 2011 we'd all be surfing around on yachts right now given the current valuation.

You're a platform drone, you have no mind, yada. Yet, we are reading the author's blog.

The author may hate LLMs, but they will lead to many people realizing things they never were aware of, like the author's superficial ability to take information and present it in a way that engages others. Soon that will be a thing that is known. Not many will make money sharing information in prose.

What the author refers to as "LLMs" today, will continually improve and "get better" at everything the author has issues with, maybe in novel ways we can't think of at the moment.

Alternative take:

"Popular culture" has always been a "lesser" ideal of experience, and now that ontological grouping now includes the Internet, as a whole. There are no safe corners, everything you experience on the Internet, if someone shared it with you, is now "Popular culture".

Everyone knows what you know, and you are no longer special or have special things to share, because awareness is ubiquitous.

This is good for society in many ways.

For example, with information asymmetry, where assholes made others their food, it will become less common that people are food.

Things like ad-driven social networks will fade away as this realization becomes normalized.

Unfortunately, we are at the very early stages of this, and it takes a very long time for people to become aware of things like hoaxes.

> And the only real hope I have here is that someday, maybe, Bitcoin will be a currency, and circulating money around won’t be the exclusive purview of Froot Loops. Christ

PLEASE NO. The only thing this will lead to is people who didn't get rich with this scheme funding the returns of people who bought in early.

Whatever BTC becomes, everyone who advocates for funneling public money of people who actually work for their salary into Bitcoin is a fraud.

I don't think the blog author actually wants this, but vaguely calling for Bitcoin to become "real money" indirectly will contribute to this bailout.

And yes, I'm well aware that funneling pension funds money etc into this pyramid scheme is already underway. Any politician or bank who supports this should be sued if you ask me.

But I disagree on LLMs being "worse than useless".

Sure, "vibe coding" an entire app from a short prompt will always give you fragile, subtly broken nonsense. *Code is the spec*. In most cases, you can't meaningfully "compress" your requirements into a short informal prompt. We need better formal languages for expressing requirements concisely and declaratively! Think: Prolog, Haskell...

LLMs are good at small tasks that you can review much quicker than doing it yourself. Something tedious, like doing some local refactoring, writing ad-hoc Bash scripts, SQL queries, FFmpeg commands. I use Bash and SQL regularly, but somehow I always have to google the exact syntax. I already use ShellCheck, by the way. It's a must, and it helps a lot when reviewing LLM output.

I like the autocomplete feature too. It often saves time when writing repetitive or obvious code. `if bad_stuff {` usually autocompletes `return Err(BadStuff)` for me. `MyStruct {` initializer usually autocompletes the list of fields for me. I know that incorrect suggestions piss off some people and make it a net-negative for them. Incorrect suggestions are common, but they don't bother me in practice.

UPDATE: I've turned this comment into a blog post. https://home.expurple.me/posts/my-take-on-llms-for-coding/

The point of doing things is the act of doing them, not the result. And if we make the result easily obtainable by using an LLM then this gets reinforced not destroyed.

I'm going to use sketching as an example, because it's something I enjoy but am very bad at. But you could talk in the same way about playing a musical instrument, writing code, writing anything really, knitting, sports, anything.

I derive inspiration from other people who can sketch really well, and I enjoy and admire their ability. But I'm happy that I will never be that good. The point of sketching (for me) is not to produce a fantastic drawing. The point is threefold: firstly to really look at the world, and secondly to practice a difficult skill, and thirdly the meditative time of being fully absorbed in a creative act.

I like that the fact that LLMs remove the false idea that the point of this is to produce Art. The LLM can almost certainly produce better Art than I can. Which is great because the point of sketching, for me, is the process not the result, and having the result be almost completely useless helps make that point. It also helps that I'm really bad at sketching, so I never want to hang the result on my wall anyway.

I understand that if you're really good at something, and take pride in the result of that, and enjoy the admiration of others at your accomplishments, then this might suck. That's gotta be tough. But if you only ever did it for the results and admiration, then maybe find something that you actually enjoy doing?

Private Equity & Financialization: Whatever for business Flood the Zone & Deadcatting: "Whatever" for politics

It's what I think about when I hear all of the "AI is going to eliminate all the jobs." That's just a convenient cover story for "Tax laws changed so R&D isn't free money anymore, and we need to fire everyone."

When almost every drop of wealth is in the control of a tiny number of people, it's not surprising that the world turns into one big competition for ways to convince those people that you have a way for them to sop up the remaining thimbleful too.

You said: how many letters are in the lithuanian word "nebeprisikaspinaudamas"? Just give me one number. ChatGPT said: 23

You said: how many letters are in the lithuanian word 'nebeprisikaspinaudamas'. Just give me one number. ChatGPT said: 21

Both are incorrect by the way. It's 22

Brenden Eich's beliefs about marriage aren't relevant. It been what well over a decade since he was ousted from Mozilla? Wasn't that enough? People constantly bring this up as a reason why you shouldn't use Brave. There are valid reasons not to use Brave Browser. Brendan Eich's beliefs about marriage isn't one of them. It some tired old jab at Eich who like most older people have beliefs that are considered backwards by today's standards.

> This is starting to get away from the main thesis of Whatever but every time I hear about students coasting through school just using LLMs, I wonder what we are doing to humanity’s ability to think critically about anything. It already wasn’t great, but now we’re raising a whole generation on a machine that gives them Whatever, and they just take it. You’ve seen anecdotes of people posting comments and submitting papers and whatnot with obvious tells like “As a large language model…” in them. That means they aren’t even reading the words they claim as their own! They just produce Whatever.

People were cut and pasting Wikipedia articles into University work and doing zero effort back in the mid-2000s while I was in University. There is a deeper problem with education generally and it isn't people copying stuff with AI.

> The most obnoxious people like to talk about how Stable Diffusion is “democratizing art” and that is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. There is no fucking King of Art decreeing who is allowed to draw and who isn’t. You could do it. You could do it right now. But it’s hard, so you’d rather spend that time crying on Twitter about how unfair it is that learning a skill takes work and thank god the computer can give you all of the admiration with none of the effort now.

This isn't what is meant when people say this.

What people typically mean is that people can cheaply create things in the AI that match what they have in their head.

e.g.

- There are parody songs / music videos made for internet streams I watch by other fans of the show. In the past people used to cheaply copy and paste stuff into a video editor and crudely animate it and they weren't great. I literally laughed a parody song that was done like a sea shanty that mocked a well known e-celeb.

- I make cheesy YouTube Thumbnails for my videos because I have zero budget for an artist and my skills with image editing software isn't stellar. I can use the AI to generate me some of the thumbnail and the rest I can do in GIMP. I get something that looks better than if I didn't have the AI IMO. This does democratise it, because I don't have to spend literally hundreds on a graphic designer.

- AI can help with animations. A friend of mind could take a 20 FPS animation and have the AI interpolate the animations accordingly. He has told me this saves him a huge amount of time.

I don't know why shitty ecosystem around cryptocurrencies drives the author to this conclusion. Crypto is the most convenient and respectful of your human rights way to just send money. It's there, it's useful and in many cases absolutely vital.

The author lost me a little on the AI rant. Yes, everything and everyone is shoving LLMs into places that I don't want it. Just today Bandcamp sent me an email about upcoming summer albums that was clearly in part written by AI. You can't get away from it, it's awful. That being said, the tooling for software development is so powerful that I feel like I'd be crazy not to use it. I save so so much time with banal programming tasks by just writing up a paragraph to cursor about what I want and how I want it done.

I understand the frustration people have with technology but it's not the technology that keeps selling them out. Bad actors take control of the technology and use it to gain and consolidate power. Identify those bad actors and bad use cases for technology and avoid giving them power. Writing whiny tropey angst ridden blog posts doesn't help anyone.

The reason behind banning adult materials has to do with Puritanism and with the high rates of refunds on adult websites.

As far as I understand, bitcoin is fundamentally unusable as a currency. Transactions are expensive and limited to ?7k? every few seconds. It's also inherently deflationary, you want inflationary currency, you want people spending, not hoarding.

But he did invent JavaScript ...

Just because you failed to use an LLM effectively the first time, or it doesn't live up to your version of the hype doesn't mean you have a magic window into how sh1t they are. Many people who use them regularly know just how bad they are and what it's like to move beyond the original context window length. But having auto complete on steroids is still the best thing with regards to making computing "fun" again in a generation. No more boiler plate, no more beating your head against a desk looking for that minor coding bug that could have been fixed by a awesome regex if only you had the time to learn it. No more having to break your stride and go through about 20 websites with popups to find that someone else solved the problem got you, just getting on with stuff and having fun whilst doing it.

Edit: no retort, just flagging and down-voting... lovely

Yes. Most developers in the corporate world are building CRUD apps that are 90% boilerplate. Hopefully this helps explain the disconnect.

And even if GenAI progress stops here and it never gets better, it's incredibly useful. Why do people realize that it can't do EVERYTHING and then get stuck to the view that they can't use it for ANYTHING, confused as to why others are getting benefit from it?

Two things can be true (and I believe they are): the hype can be "staggeringly overblown" AND it can still be useful in many cases.

Like the author, I'm mystified by those who accept the appearance of output as a valid goal.

Even with constrained algorithmic "AI" like Stockfish, which, unlike LLMs, actually works, chess players frown heavily on using it for cheating. No chess player can go to a tournament and say: "I made this game with Stockfish."

> I don’t want to help someone who opens with “I don’t know how to do this so I asked ChatGPT and it gave me these 200 lines but it doesn’t work”.

Monero is what Bitcoin should have been.

Then it became hip, and people would hand-roll machine-specific assembly code. Later on, it became too onerous when CPU architecture started to change faster than programmers could churn out code. So we came up with compilers, and people started coding at a higher level of abstraction. No one lamented the lost art of assembly.

Coding is just a means to an end. We’ve always searched for better and easier ways to convince the rocks to do something for us. LLMs will probably let us jump another abstraction level higher.

I too spent hours looking for the right PHP or Perl snippet in the early days to do something. My hard-earned bash-fu is mostly useless now. Am I sad about it? Nah. Writing bash always sucked, who am I kidding. Also, regex. I never learned it properly. It doesn’t appeal to me. So I’m glad these whatever machines are helping me do this grunt work.

There are sides of programming I like, and implementation isn’t one of them. Once upon a time I could care less about the binary streams ticking the CPU. Now I’m excited about the probable prospect of not having to think as much about “higher-level” code and jumping even higher.

To me, programming is more like science than art. Science doesn’t care how much profundity we find in the process. It moves on to the next thing for progress.

I clicked halfheartedly, started to read halfheartedly, and got sucked into a read that threw me back into the good old days of the internet.

A pity that the micropayments mentioned in the post never materialized, I'd surely throw a few bucks at the author but the only option is a subscription and I hate those.

> There are people who use these, apparently. And it just feels so… depressing. There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge that vaguely resembles it. That isn’t programming, though. That’s management, a fairly different job. I’m not interested in managing. I’m certainly not interested in managing this bizarre polite lying daydream machine. It feels like a vizier who has definitely been spending some time plotting my demise.

I was several minutes of reading before this paragraph when the idea hit me that this person hates managing. Because everyone I’ve met who hates using AI to produce software describes to me problems like the AI not being correct or lying to them if the model thought that would please you better, and that’s my experience with junior engineers as a manager.

And everyone I’ve met who loves AI at some point makes an analogy to it, that compares it to a team of eager juniors who can do a lot of work fast but can’t have their output trusted blindly, and that’s my experience with junior engineers as a manager.

And then anyone whose been trying to get an Engineering manager job over the past few months and tracking their applications metadata has seen the number of open postings for their requirements go down month after month unless you drop the manager part and keep all the same criteria but as IC

And then I read commentary from megacorps about their layoffs and read between the lines like here[1]

>… a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement, adding that the company is reducing managerial layers …

I think our general consternation around this is coming from creators being forced into management instead of being able to outsource those tasks to their own managers.

I am not really sure what to do with this insight

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/02/tech/microsoft-layoffs-9000-e...

That seems snarky ("you don't want to learn things") when the reality is that the problem, the finite ressource that is the bottleneck, is _time_.

This is also why hyperlinks are underused: few people go through every single one of the words in their last post to try to add appropriate hyperlinks.

The reason for this is as follows: A good number of software engineers make a fuckton of money, but not all of them (it's bimodal/trimodal/whatever). SWEs are also one of the highest paid people within tech companies, often earning more than the MBAs, the CPAs, and the JDs (who tend to come with massive chips on account of actually having actual credentials, and tech companies being prestigious destinations within these profession).

It seems that over time, this phenomenon has caused the emergence of a large coterie of people whom I would kindly describe as being "bearish" of these high-end software engineering salaries and double-down on any narrative that undermines the livelihood of the software engineer, basically just to make themselves feel better.

tl;dr people desperately want AI to succeed because they're envious of software engineers

Yes that is actually roughly the take away here. LLMs are getting so popular in programming not because they are good at solving problems but because they are good at reproducing a solution to some minor variation of an existing problem which has already been solved many times.

Most of the work that most of the industry does is just re-solving the same set of problems. This is not just because of NIH but also because code reuse is a hard problem.

This is not to say that everything is the same product. The set or problems you solve and how you chain those solutions together (the overarching architecture) as well as the small set of unique problems you solve are the real value in a product. But its often not the majority of any single codebase.

I remember when PayPal came to Australia, I was so confused by it as I could just send money via internet banking. Then they tried to lobby the government to make our banking system worse so they could compete, much like Uber.