This doesn't seem like a well-thought-out post. I mean, I probably could have told you that from the fact that it's either pro-AI or anti-AI (in this case the latter), but this is a particularly poorly thought out post. Others here have pointed out the water-wasting red herring, but there are several other pieces of nonsense here — the general environmental doom-mongering, and labeling recursive self-improvement as "mystical", for example.
Me, I pointed Claude Opus 5 at a C codebase I've been working on for years and it immediately found five serious bugs and told me how to fix them, as well as how to use Linux system calls I wasn't familiar with to solve some other problems. And I gave it a new language for PEGs I'd written up a couple of years ago, and it wrote me a working implementation in OCaml that afternoon, fixing several bugs in my example grammars along the way and resolving a conceptual problem I'd had a roadblock on. I asked Fable 5.1 to implement a minimal proof assistant, and it wrote a clone of J-Bob in Python, which I'm studying now. Although there is a certain firehose quality to this stuff, I sure don't intend to use AI to actively de-skill my brain.
That doesn't guarantee that AI will be a beneficial innovation overall, of course! As with most innovations, it probably depends on the balance between people being able to use the innovation to gain control over their own lives, and people being able to use it to gain control over others' lives. (Barring a FOOM scenario, of course, where our prediction ability is nonexistent.)
So, I don't think a pro-AI post can be well thought out, either. It's too early and chaotic to understand what's going to happen, and it may actually be uncertain. Pro and anti are both far too simplistic.
My impression was that the frontier AI coding models are kind of resetting the barriers to entry/reward ratios to before the dot com boom, when people didn't go into this career for money, and so most folks that ended up in it were the 1% kind of talents who really wanted it. Perhaps that's an elitist thing to say? I don't know. That's not to say that AI is pushing people away from computing, it's just that it's creating such massive low resistance paths to getting to the goal without the "productive friction."
p.s. and at the same time, it's such a fantastic learning tool. It distills the intuition of a whole world and is able to transmit it on demand, like in your examples. It's an interesting dichotomy.
I don't know, maybe? I think it's opened the doors to a lot of people who don't really want to program, but do want, for example, a studio appointment booking management system. Which is good; people's needs matter just as much if they don't enjoy programming. You can use it to create a pretty wide range of things, which seems like it's going to change the things that get created in hard-to-predict ways.
Structurally, though, I'm sort of pessimistic.
Throughout my career as a programmer, I've earned much more money than electronic engineers whose skills are mostly very similar, and probably much of this happy situation is due to the fact that my productivity depends only on me having access to a computer with GCC and Perl or Python on it, and the internet. If I were living in rural Malawi, I probably couldn't practice my trade, because the US$200 it takes to buy a working laptop is a year's wages there, and people lack the social permission to innovate. (William Kamkwamba's astounding achievements under those circumstances deserve more recognition. Read his autobiography!) But, if I work in any developed economy, that's somewhere between 1 hour and 20 hours of my earnings, so I'm not dependent on investors to create jobs for me.
By contrast, electrical engineers mostly can't ship their designs unless an investor is willing to put up the capital to produce a batch of PCBs or chips — probably three batches or so before you get a fully working product. If you're working on a cutting-edge chip, that's several million dollars, so you're probably not going to save that up while working as an employee. This puts electrical engineers in a much worse bargaining position relative to investors. To a smaller extent, the same thing applies to machinists, auto mechanics, and many other skilled workers: they only get jobs if investors invest to create jobs for them.
The capital-intensive nature of current AI seems like it might push the negotiation equilibrium for programmers two or three orders of magnitude in favor of investors.
But it might not work out that way, and, at least at the moment, I'm finally bringing about numerous projects I'd been procrastinating on for years.
kragen · · focus · HN ↗
Me, I pointed Claude Opus 5 at a C codebase I've been working on for years and it immediately found five serious bugs and told me how to fix them, as well as how to use Linux system calls I wasn't familiar with to solve some other problems. And I gave it a new language for PEGs I'd written up a couple of years ago, and it wrote me a working implementation in OCaml that afternoon, fixing several bugs in my example grammars along the way and resolving a conceptual problem I'd had a roadblock on. I asked Fable 5.1 to implement a minimal proof assistant, and it wrote a clone of J-Bob in Python, which I'm studying now. Although there is a certain firehose quality to this stuff, I sure don't intend to use AI to actively de-skill my brain.
That doesn't guarantee that AI will be a beneficial innovation overall, of course! As with most innovations, it probably depends on the balance between people being able to use the innovation to gain control over their own lives, and people being able to use it to gain control over others' lives. (Barring a FOOM scenario, of course, where our prediction ability is nonexistent.)
So, I don't think a pro-AI post can be well thought out, either. It's too early and chaotic to understand what's going to happen, and it may actually be uncertain. Pro and anti are both far too simplistic.
foobarian · · focus · HN ↗
p.s. and at the same time, it's such a fantastic learning tool. It distills the intuition of a whole world and is able to transmit it on demand, like in your examples. It's an interesting dichotomy.
kragen · · focus · HN ↗
Structurally, though, I'm sort of pessimistic.
Throughout my career as a programmer, I've earned much more money than electronic engineers whose skills are mostly very similar, and probably much of this happy situation is due to the fact that my productivity depends only on me having access to a computer with GCC and Perl or Python on it, and the internet. If I were living in rural Malawi, I probably couldn't practice my trade, because the US$200 it takes to buy a working laptop is a year's wages there, and people lack the social permission to innovate. (William Kamkwamba's astounding achievements under those circumstances deserve more recognition. Read his autobiography!) But, if I work in any developed economy, that's somewhere between 1 hour and 20 hours of my earnings, so I'm not dependent on investors to create jobs for me.
By contrast, electrical engineers mostly can't ship their designs unless an investor is willing to put up the capital to produce a batch of PCBs or chips — probably three batches or so before you get a fully working product. If you're working on a cutting-edge chip, that's several million dollars, so you're probably not going to save that up while working as an employee. This puts electrical engineers in a much worse bargaining position relative to investors. To a smaller extent, the same thing applies to machinists, auto mechanics, and many other skilled workers: they only get jobs if investors invest to create jobs for them.
The capital-intensive nature of current AI seems like it might push the negotiation equilibrium for programmers two or three orders of magnitude in favor of investors.
But it might not work out that way, and, at least at the moment, I'm finally bringing about numerous projects I'd been procrastinating on for years.