> In all sincerity, what do you mean by wholly unpleasant?
“Wholly” was too strong a word now that I think about it.
But I’ll give two main things I find unpleasant.
One: Normally I like working with other people. There is nothing more satisfying than collaborating on a complex problem with smart and conscientious colleagues. However, the bad experiences are now amplified:
- a random colleague gets sent down a wild gooose chase of an LLM claiming there is an issue with something I wrote. It’s a full blown hallucination because it found a confluence page which mentioned me and just decided to connect things together.
- another colleague is suddenly empowered with being able to vibe code websites and is now copying and pasting my replies into an LLM and pasting the LLM back at me over Slack.
- a colleague gives a quick drive by vibe coded PR to add a feature into something I own. It reimplements the same business logic that is already done elsewhere. It takes me more energy to explain all this than just do it myself.
There are dozens more examples. In isolation I can shrug each of these off, but it’s draining. Large organisations have become more “agile” with local optimisations and missing the bigger picture.
Two: while I agree that everything is getting done faster and I do get satisfaction out of that, I’m a deep in the weeds technical person. I don’t have it in me to be a big picture person or a people leader. I love having to think about algorithms, data structures, schemas, etc. While I can use AI has a pair programmer, it’s doing a lot of the thinking for me and it’s usually faster. So yes it makes me a better engineer, no I don’t enjoy not thinking as much. I don’t enjoy shifting solely to a higher level of abstraction. Maybe that makes me a bad engineer, but I cannot change how I feel about it.
30 years in the industry for me. It’s been a wild last few years watching this transformation. Like the OP I find it wholly unpleasant and I also can’t deny the productivity boost. I’m very glad I’m nearly ready for retirement and I look forward to watching this “progress” from a comfortable distance.
> In a pay per token situation, there is a huge conflict of interest with the harness provider and the token seller being the same party ... efficiency is less profitable.
Except there’s a competitive incentive to either use less tokens or make the tokens go further
It may come as a surprise to any rational person but some people actually believe that attempting to regulate safety into these models and arbitrarily enforcing them is a good idea.
> Do you know of people who don’t think “AI” will have a positive impact on society but still choose to use it?
Yes. Per your previous statement, those people who are “forced” to use it at work. While it might be a requirement of their job, what job they do is usually a choice.
Walter, I believe the idea against wealth inequality is not purely that there are wealthier people but that their wealth should be redistributed such that the wealthier people are less wealthy (but still wealthier) and the poorer people are less poor (but still poorer).
Per a comment I made to one of your other replies in this thread, VPS doesn’t exclude this. You can put it behind cloudflare for free.
And yes you can have preferences to keep things simple while others can make something unnecessarily complex. For personal projects this is fine and part of learning. If you had said “I much prefer… because…” it would have been fine but you said “objectively inferior in every meaningful way” which ignores people’s subjective preference for over engineering hobby stuff for learning.
> want your site to choke during once-in-lifetime opportunities to go life-changingly viral, and like contributing to the global population malicious botnets.
I don’t do it myself, but “objectively inferior in every meaningful way” is a bold claim. It might be harder, but we (geeks) love to do things ourselves.
If someone is willing to use something like Hugo instead of garbage sites like Medium why not use a VPS? For many people working in tech $10/month and free are the same thing.
“Wholly” was too strong a word now that I think about it.
But I’ll give two main things I find unpleasant.
One: Normally I like working with other people. There is nothing more satisfying than collaborating on a complex problem with smart and conscientious colleagues. However, the bad experiences are now amplified:
- a random colleague gets sent down a wild gooose chase of an LLM claiming there is an issue with something I wrote. It’s a full blown hallucination because it found a confluence page which mentioned me and just decided to connect things together.
- another colleague is suddenly empowered with being able to vibe code websites and is now copying and pasting my replies into an LLM and pasting the LLM back at me over Slack.
- a colleague gives a quick drive by vibe coded PR to add a feature into something I own. It reimplements the same business logic that is already done elsewhere. It takes me more energy to explain all this than just do it myself.
There are dozens more examples. In isolation I can shrug each of these off, but it’s draining. Large organisations have become more “agile” with local optimisations and missing the bigger picture.
Two: while I agree that everything is getting done faster and I do get satisfaction out of that, I’m a deep in the weeds technical person. I don’t have it in me to be a big picture person or a people leader. I love having to think about algorithms, data structures, schemas, etc. While I can use AI has a pair programmer, it’s doing a lot of the thinking for me and it’s usually faster. So yes it makes me a better engineer, no I don’t enjoy not thinking as much. I don’t enjoy shifting solely to a higher level of abstraction. Maybe that makes me a bad engineer, but I cannot change how I feel about it.