I find myself wondering what to do with this article and the incredibly well-condensed collection of sentiments therein. Do I drop a furtive link in that #ai-enthusiasts Slack channel, in full view of everybody, including that CTO of mine who is REALLY excited about this stuff, and isn't quite ready to issue an AI usage mandate? Or do I keep this secreted away, like a bible in my left jacket pocket in case one of "their" sharpshooters attempts to assassinate me with an AI silver bullet, as though I were some wild and reckless heathen that seeks to abandon all good sense in the selfish pursuit of personal pride?

I don't mean to be hyperbolic, but I never envisioned this moment of feeling bizarre, feckless and iconoclast for wanting to do what feels like the reasonable thing. The circular finances propping this stuff up don't add up. Do I really want to be left dependent on a thing that only really feels like it just flashed into precarious existence, that will almost without a doubt be propped up, classed as "too big to fail" by one particular nation-state, whose actual intent and interests are to subjugate its subjects into a quivering oblivion when it's finally acknowledged the whole thing is in arrears? No, goddammit, I shouldn't have to accept this barrage against and wholesale weakening of my strongest assets: My mind and my discipline. At least that's how I feel about it anyway.

I do wonder the prospects of any etsy-like outcome for largely hand crafted software though. While you can personally find stylistic expression in the craft i'm not sure how apparent the nuances of crafting code is to users of the product beyond the requirements of a UX design and vision. It's hard not to imagine generation industrializing a lot of this part of the craft of making software.

For me I think the important thing to not lose sight as we use generation more and more in software is our care for the work piece. It feels like care, and deep understanding are set up to become further valuable rarities in the future as we become less and less intimately involved and we have to be intentional about in order to keep.

I feel like there is some parallels here to industrial designers and their desire to hold on to obsessing about and understanding the details in the face of using industrialized tooling and being very much removed from the intimate feeling of crafting every millimetre. Deeply caring is still meaningful and valuable even if it isn't minimally required.

The immediate example of something where good code DOES stand out to me is (one of my favorite games of all time) Factorio. There are lots of examples where I have been playing over the years and been amazed at the ability of the game engine to handle computationally complex operations at a really large scale. Coupled with a bunch of dev blogs explaining the little optimizations, its given me a ton of respect for Factorio as a piece of software.

That said, I am not sure it strictly invalidates your point. That’s the only example I can come up with, and it requires knowledge of the game’s design via those devblogs which the average user of a messaging app or something won’t have.

I think there’s probably a market for high performance consumer code, but the vast majority of what makes it to end users will just be good enough.

Maybe the arguing is really over whether it's higher-status to enjoy longform content, or to criticize it for not being more efficient? By identifying the argument, I've revealed it as silly, and clearly proven myself to be higher status than either side. The arguing may stop now. You're welcome.

There's a flaw in the Milli Vanilli argument. The band had no input into their songs. They 'performed' them by lip-syncing on stage, but all of the music and lyrics were someone elses. Milli Vanilli had no part in the creative process.

That's not technically true of AI content. There's some tiny little seed of a creative starting point in the form of a prompt needed for AI. When someone makes something with Claude or Nano Banana it's based on their idea, with their prompt, and their taste selecting whether the output is an acceptable artefact of what they wanted to make. I don't think you can just disregard that. They might not have wielded the IDE or camera or whatever, and you might believe that prompting and selecting which output you like has no value, but you can't claim there's no input or creativity required from the author. There is.

AI is like a camera. Photographs can be art, but they aren't always. If you prompt an LLM only with "write me a novel," you can't take credit for the result, any more than if you took a cell-phone snap of the Mona Lisa. But AI can be used intentionally to create art, same as a carefully planned portrait photoshoot is art.

Art isn't a binary. Art is a spectrum. A creation is art to the extent that it reflects an artist's unique vision, not because of the tools the artist used (or didn't use.)

Ah yes, the “tiny little seed” defense — because if I hum three notes and Quincy Jones writes the symphony, clearly we co-composed it.

Sure, prompting involves taste and direction. So does ordering at a restaurant. But if I tell the chef “spicy, but make it fusion” and then Instagram the plate as my culinary creation, I’m not suddenly Gordon Ramsay.

Nobody’s saying there’s zero input. We’re saying input isn’t authorship. A seed isn’t a forest — and picking your favorite output isn’t the same as growing it.

I could claim there's even less creativity than lip syncing, and I will.

And if there was any creativity, the use it is being put to is to do violence to artists. If you think you deserve someone else's work as your own, you better be prepared for the fact that you won't even really understand who you're ripping off, but someone else sure as shit will and they're going to be pissed as hell.

At least Milli themselves a) knew what they were doing, b) paid the real singers I presume and c) presented real art created by real people.

But still everyone was mad at the lie of it, at being asked to venerate an imposter. And being asked to believe that in the future "impostor" will be the most venerable role. No. Just no.

That reference though! I never thought I'd ever read on HN a blog mentioning Girl you know it's true from Milli Vanilli. Wow the throwback in (exceptionally cheesy) time.

> Companies value velocity and new launches and shipping first at all costs because of course they do; it’s table stakes. Speed of delivery is basically the number one corporate value of every organization whether they admit to it or not.

Yeah this one is again one of the causes of where we are today (alongside profit extraction, or perhaps because of it). It used to be the case that you would find companies that would offer quality at a slightly higher price, and people would be more than willing to pay for it. Now the feeling is that this is all marketing driven and there is no 'higher quality' because everyone gave up and went after speed of delivery. And well, as the old saying goes, that's valuable when you're catching fleas.

I read it all, and found myself engaged throughout. Not to say that it was all riveting, there were certainly dryer spots than others, but it felt 'real'. Maybe they did use AI (I somehow doubt that given the content), but even if they did they went over everything in a way that retained a voice that felt authentic.

I hate many of the articles I read now all feel like they have the same half hearted attempt at trying to grab your attention without every actually clearly saying what they mean.

As for the content, I had actually just been told by management this last week that I need to become AI 'fluent' as part of future performance evaluations and I have been deeply conflicted about it. I do think AI has value to add, but I don't think it's something that should be forced and so this article resonated with me.

It's a long read, and not for everyone, but I recommend it as a way of hearing another humans opinion and deciding for yourself if it has value.

I hear this and FWIW, if there aren't very specific things being asked of you, using AI as a stack overflow replacement as the OP admits to doing is as "AI fluent" as anything else in my book.

Also, Aislopica. He missed the opportunity to say Aislopica Fables.

"I’m not arguing that this technology should be unilaterally destroyed; I am arguing that we are collectively using it in the dumbest possible way, causing the most self-inflicted injury, and maximizing the amount of angst and suffering we’ll all have to contend with. I am angry at generative AI because it seems to be making us think and act like complete idiots."

Made me smile.

I know this is probably a deliberate simplification as part of a rhetorical flourish but one of my favourite parts about semiconductors is the fact that we don't dig up the rocks, we grow them to order. The though fills me with childlike wonder...

Honestly I don't think so. An essay like this is more than just content, it's an experience for the reader. I value the time I got to spend with it and feel I came way with value that a summary or condensed version would just not have had.

The author has made the correct call. There's a pretty deep irony that all the top-level comments at the time of this writing are about how the article is too long. It's quite clearly not trying to succinctly convince you of a point, it's meant to be a piece of genuinely human writing, and enjoyed (or not!) on the basis of that.

All other top level arguments offer AI summaries that miss all of the interesting, nuanced, wide-reaching topics about AI and its impact on our humanity, and complain it was too long to read.

Truly a gem of irony.

And I really loved this essay. It's the single best piece of writing on "AI" I have read yet.

Everything you say, I disagree with.

I loved the essay. If anyone didn't enjoy it, quit halfway, or decided not to read it, that's absolutely fine. There's plenty of thoughtful writing I don't enjoy or don’t feel like spending my time with. But it is well-executed.

But apparently a sizable percentage of today's HN user base can't get through it, and finds the very idea of being able to get through anything longer than an LLM summary objectionable.

If I wanted to be an ass, I would call it a "skill issue."

But I don't want to be an ass. It's just deeply sad.

The feeling of boredom created in me is the author's fault. This is just content.

I remember people saying this about emails vs postal mail.

It feels like half the people here do not read or write in their free time, which would be understandable if this were not primarily a site for software engineers who write (sorta) as a job

But after reading this comment section... I mean if enjoying well written prose counts as enjoying craft and artistry I guess I do then? Damn.

This is not prose, it is exposition. It is perfectly valid to critique any expository essay, especially one of this length, for its density (or lack thereof) of substantive information.

A person writing an essay on their own site doesn't need to have the information density of bus timetable.

But this seemed like it bridges the gap between prose and an expository essay -it was doing both.

Putting prose in an essay means there are more valid criticisms of a piece of writing, not fewer. If somebody is breakdancing and reciting the periodic table at the same time it’s ok if somebody notices if they skipped the lanthanides and actinides.

I’m a fan of blending the two! It’s just really really hard to do both well at the same time. My most recent example is Malcolm Harris’ history of Palo Alto, it is incredibly well-done.

It’s an exponentially more difficult way to accomplish either goal because one reader will see it and think “this is a sixteen thousand word essay that says very little” and another will see it and think “what a wonderful story” and there’s nobody to adjudicate who is correct.

Like I posted “this is sixteen thousand words about how the author doesn’t really use language models but might one day” and some folks’ rebuttal is that they enjoyed reading it. Those are two completely unrelated things! It’s like if folks saw the cover of The Hobbit and thought “Hell yeah!” and then when they read “there and back again” thought “whoever wrote that was being unnecessarily reductive”

I mostly skimmed it. It’s entirely feasible that the author buried a confession about getting away with manslaughter or whatever that I missed somewhere in a few sentences in the middle of that novella though. It does begin with several paragraphs essentially telling you not to read the post and has a lot of completely unnecessary exposition (for example the section on Luddites)

Edit: I want to point out that I went over the post with my own eyeballs and brain

Blaise Pascal, French mathematician, in “Lettres Provinciales,” circa 1657.

Every time I check this comment section, this sentence jumps out at me again. You "had to" ask an LLM. You "had to".

>Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: “After [however long] using AI coding assistants, there’s no way I’m going back!” You know, I don’t doubt that this is true. Because I’m not sure some of the people who say this could go back. It reads like praise on the surface, but those same words betray a chilling sense of dependence.

Perhaps, very ironically, they did "have to."

> I had to

got 'em