it’s getting to the point where I notice people say it a lot, especially IRL now for whatever reason recently.
And for clarity I’m not in research or anything, so these people just mean ‘LLM/image gen’, not utilities like OCR or (usually not) transcription.
Some have argued it’s just more efficient (which I can kind of get), while others think you’re actively hindering your intelligence somehow.
On the first point:
I’ve tried it occasionally to see how it compares to my own skill, and while it produces a functional result, it’s always very derivative work to the point where you can find things with the exact same names of other ‘public’ (but not libre) works, and often isn’t the ideal solution to what it targets. So I can see how you can get things out of it, but it never felt really that profound to me.
But for the second… isn’t this supposed to be the tool for people to do things they aren’t experienced in? If anything, you probably need to be able to understand how to write pertaining to the task so the token probabilities are biased toward writing from that area.
And even then, if all you end up doing is prompting AI, then wouldn’t you ultimately serve no purpose outside of being glorified QA?
I guess I’m trying to figure out what exactly non-users would be ‘falling behind’ in that affects them more than those who use AI?
I translate this to: “if I’m making a horrible mistake, I want you right there with me when it blows up in my face.”
If they actually felt it gave them an advantage they wouldn’t be trying to convince everyone else to do it too.
Indeed. Moreover, a lot of people seem to believe that if they really buy into the technology, they’ll be protected from its inevitable economic outfall. They won’t.
im going to put it easy: You work doing some kind of research or whatever on daily basis. You used to do that task in maybe 5-6 hours, same as your colleagues. Now all your colleagues use AI and do the same task in about 20min (even if the result is crap it does have some good takes), so the CEO sees you are the only one who doesn’t perform equally because you choose not to, and you’re fired.
So yeah… it’s crap, it will make things worse, but for now you have to use it wheter you like it or not.
100% this in corpo developer jobs.
We need to pin this answer on every post about AI in the workplace.
I’m in software engineering. AI is pretty far along in my field, and also very suited for it. I’ve spent two decades writing everything from very low-level to high-level code. I enjoy it, but it’s just labor at this point. What LLMs allows me to do is move to the role of systems architect. I have an endless supply of tireless jr engineers to execute my designs.
I get quick results. But I’m not as in touch with the codebase as if I had written it myself. You can do things wrong, and you can do things right. I like to compare it with a chainsaw. You get the job done a lot faster than with a regular saw, but you can fuck up a lot harder, too.
The field is moving fast. In the last two years it’s gone from helpful auto-complete to finishing projects on its own.
I expect to be downvoted.
I’m also in software engineering. I spent some time thinking like you, then some time trying to find a middle ground between using AI like that and doing everything myself.
Now I do it all without AI and am slowly purging all of the rituals around LLM usage from my brain. I’m trying to reclaim that space for useful knowledge in the languages I like to work with.
The reasons are numerous, some ethical, some practical, and some personal.
Ethical:
- There’s no way to use frontier LLMs without contributing to climate change. The products of Anthropic and OpenAI are built on raiding the planet’s resources.
- They’re also built on plagiarism on an unprecedented scale. Their products wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for stealing basically all copyrighted works ever created by people, and would be even less economically viable than they already are if they were forced to pay for the thievery.
- They’re addictive to use. People become dependent on them to the point of losing the ability to make decisions on their own. The non-deterministic nature of their output means people react psychologically to them the way gambling addicts react to roulette wheels, always hoping the next prompt will be the one that hits gold.
- Small, local models help, and the ones that are both open source and open weight are far superior to the rest in terms of ethics, so for anyone addicted to LLMs, I’ll recommend them as a form of methadone. But their psychological impact on their users can be just as damaging.
- The business practices of these companies is driving the largest economic bubble in history. When (not if) the bubble collapses, it will hurt millions of people. They don’t care, because in the short term, number go up.
Practical
- Model-produced code isn’t as good as anyone who’s creating it thinks it is. I’ve lost count of the number of projects I’ve seen from other developers (who think they’ve mastered the art of AI wrangling) that contain rudimentary errors - including gaping security flaws. I found the problems just by being the first person in a while to actually look at the code. No, not diffs, because when you’re churning out five thousand-line PRs, if the PR “looks right,” you’ll usually just sign off on it.
- The Supreme Court has already ruled that the output of LLMs can’t be copyrighted. So from a legal perspective, you’re risking poisoning your own projects with the output of coding agents. If someone steals that output and markets it as their own, what are you going to do? It was already derived from stolen work itself, so it’s not like it’s yours.
- Becoming dependent on businesses that have no path to profitability is a terrible idea. If you have built your workflow around Claude Code and Anthropic folds, what will you do? These companies cannot offer their services in a way that brings them sustainable profit. When the venture capital runs out, the clock starts ticking on their actual viability.
Personal
- Both of my kids are artists. I want to be able to look them in the eye and tell them I’m not using tools that are designed to make creativity obsolete and replace it with statistically generated pixels.
- I’m also a writer. I don’t want to become dependent on tools that deprived my fellow writers of their copyrights so that slop manufacturers can try to replace them with statistically generated words.
- I hate the way I feel when I’m using an LLM. The brief highs of getting the output I wanted (more or less) is offset by the impact on the way my brain works. I find myself thinking less and asking the LLM for its “opinions” more. I stop trusting my own judgment. And I start feeling addicted.
On that last point: I knew I had to stop entirely - not just limit my usage or restrict myself to local models - when I realized part of my brain really didn’t want me to. I had to have an argument with myself in order to do anything by hand, and I like coding by hand. I enjoy the puzzle-solving. AI was replacing my main source of enjoyment in my job.
And it wasn’t even doing that part well, it was just doing it faster. I am a better coder than any LLM, and that’s not a brag, because I know there are tons of developers out there better than me. Faster doesn’t equal better.
So that’s where I’m at today.
Thanks for the great write up. Especially the ethical reasons are so often ignored, overlooked, cast aside with a smirk.
My pleasure. The ethical problems with LLMs are my top concern, and I can only conclude that many people in my industry are too addicted to them now to internalize those problems.
My experience has been that when you educate people on the background and non ethical training on AI, you get a blank stare.
Either the scope is too big or they do not really believe the implications. I don’t know. I wish there was a short layman relatable and believable explanation.
I expect to be downvoted.
I mean, you’re not wrong. You’re only saying facts. I’m a strong AI opponent, but these things you’re saying are simply true. 🤷♂️ That said, I like coding and doing that bit myself, so I’ll keep coding. 😅
I like the chainsaw analogy but I think you need to apply it more like, you’re trying to carve something out of a tree stump and you only have a chainsaw nothing else. So you can make it look good. But the fine little detail work isn’t as possible. You have you go back in with other tools to do fine detail work.
And like a chainsaw, without practice, you have no idea what you’re doing at first. If you vibe code something without coding experience, a lot can go wrong but if you don’t understand how it works, you can’t fix it.
I heard an analogy about an electric screwdriver, too. It makes the job go faster, but you still need to know what kind of screws to use and where to place them.
But yes, it can be faster. And you can dig yourself into a hole faster if you let your agent take lead.
Its people falling for propaganda.
The fact of the matter is, AI can be useful for minor coding help. The reality is its stealing advice from one or a few sources and spitting out an answer based on them, but it can be a quick delivery of advice.
The major problem is
- AI (these LLMs) hallucinate ALL THE TIME. Relying on them to code for you is fucking moronic. Every coworker I’ve seen who does vibe coding is constantly getting dunked on, their pull requests are torn to pieces, and its baffling why they still get a paycheck.
- AI can only, in the best circumstances, do exactly what you tell it to do. That is to say, you need to explicitly spell out what you want for it, including explicitly covering edge cases. If you don’t, you end up with situations like Microsoft making Notepad code executable (which actually fucking happened.
Promotion of AI is total horseshit by the fascist tech broligarchs being done so they can replace the worker and, and I’m serious, achieve immortality by transferring their consciousness to machine. That isn’t a fucking joke, that’s an actual belief they hold. The AI and general tech CEOs are all in a massive death cult. This is real.
My experience of a decade in corporate US companies:
Quantity > Quality; no matter what the marketing line says. People who speak a lot in meetings and send a lot of emails are regarded as better at their job, substance is only somewhat relevant. And LLMs are great at producing lots and lots of well sounding slop.
They think there’s some skill necessary to use LLMs for some reason
I think when people talk about “falling behind” they’re actually talking about missing out on the initial gold rush of novel uses, quick cash grabs, and straight up scams that a lot of people are making short term money on.
I kind of look at it from the point of view of people who are bad at their jobs.
They don’t understand what looks good. They don’t understand how long something should take. They don’t understand how to do parts of their job without copying the work of others. Then, they get given a tool with the promise that the tool will do most of the hard work for them.
And unlike most computer stuff they can’t understand, they can understand how to use AI. So if they can understand how to use AI, anyone can. And it isn’t like most people are good at their jobs anyway.
There’s a lot clearly unemployed/in industry that doesn’t spin around AI in here.
In dev, AI saves fuck tons of time. But there’s no nuance on the Internet so everyone assumes I’m advocating for vibe coding. I’m not.
What the “fall behind” is referring to is the simplest fact, if you’re in a team and you’re not using AI? You are very likely outputting at a much slower speed.
Now more caveats, you’re not a lead dev or principle architect, your code isn’t second coming of Jesus, you need to get a task done. Like it or not, the pace rest of the team sets? Is the new floor.
I manage a team and while I give them a lot of time to get work done well, the world around us is shrinking in resources. Business cares not that a job takes 4 weeks, they need it done in 2, ideally in 1 week.
Hopefully this sheds some light on this. I’m getting downvoted regardless. I’d probably have more popular opinion praising trump than daring say anything positive about AI here.
I can understand this viewpoint (and it’s similar to the first point), and I do agree that there is a push to defer things to AI. But from my limited experience, it’s like a crutch for other issues that force it to be used by very talented people who otherwise want to get things done properly to save headaches later.
My experience was in the kind of place you would really not want AI to screw you over in, but there was also a very tight timeline to get things done, so I think they ended up just trusting AI to a pretty frightening extent with (iirc) some buildroot stuff that got some people a bit vocal. I think even I used an AI overview once because I just really wanted to be done with a demo.
It was over a year ago though so I don’t really remember what ultimately came of the AI use, but there are 100% situations where this becomes the only option, although I personally will avoid AI unless I’m realistically out of any other option not to. And for that reason I’ve fallen more out of favour with CS since I enjoy the journey and all the little judgements you make more than the outcome.
From what I’ve experienced it’s mostly managers saying this. They’re afraid of competitors taking over the market because they can be more efficient with AI. They say this without any idea of how exactly that would work.
FOMO, and the temptation of being able to get the speed of AI without the drawbacks of “vibe coding”.
Reality is much more nuanced.
You can get a massive boost in your productivity if you use dependencies or just steal code, compared to writing everything from zero. I personally just reuse my own code snippets, and even started to put regularly reused code into their own libraries (next up is to make stuff for parsers).
I also seen cases, when “AI assisted” coding had the same amount of issues as fully vibe coded stuff, as the person really wanting to cram the chatbot into their workflow did that trusted Grok too much with understanding the documentations, so he just ended up trying to implement stuff based on Grok’s summary, which was wrong at places.
If you ask: artists also sometimes fall for this trap, though much less often.
AI is a tool. Learning to wield it effectively is a skill. What they’re saying is that if you don’t learn it now, you’ll have to learn it later when everyone is an expert and you’ll still be a beginner.
IMO it’s a bit like computers. I imagine at some point AI-resistant people will be like the “not computer people” that still do everything using paper and faxes.
I know every 2-3 years there’s a new hype in tech that eventually fizzes out: Web 2.0, social media, virtual reality, cryptocurrency, etc. All of them were supposed to revolutionize the world, but not all of them actually did. I think AI is a lot more like social media than crypto; it’s here to stay. I think the best possible outcome at this point is that the open-source models eventually get good enough and small enough to run on our local hardware, but things sadly don’t seem headed that way…
I think AI is a lot more like social media than crypto; it’s here to stay.
Do you think that comparison means that it’s a positive thing? Social media did a lot of damage.
Yeah, I choose that comparison intentionally. Social media was seen as good early on, but got enshittified beyond recognition. Shitty as it is, it’s still very much a necessity in modern life (see: institutions using it to broadcast information, non-tech people using it to communicate and organize events, etc).
AI will be similar, it’s already changed how I work: developing software now is much more about managing the process than writing code. I don’t mind that much; writing code was never the fun part for me. I also wanted to go into management at some point, but not like this… I’m also worried about the future of the profession; how are we going to create new senior devs if there are no juniors today?
Where do they say it is a positive thing?
They are saying it is here to stay. Whether it is like the common cold or the vaccine is up to you.
It’s a desperate marketing strategy based on the classic “peer pressure” technique. “Everyone’s doing it. You don’t want to be the only one who isn’t.”
Try throwing AI at boring repetitive work.
I argued with an LLM for about 15 minutes and got a list of IPs and the name of the systems that used them. I could have done it manually in about an hour.Also I’d argue that it’s the opposite. It’s for people that are experienced. If you can’t check the output for correctness it’s most likely wrong. I’ve never had the right answer the first time I asked.
I think a good alternative explanation is this: AI is here to stay, so knowing how to use it in whatever form it takes in your life as a tool is good knowledge to have.
Typewriters are close to extinction, but most everyone these days uses a computer to write documents. Those that refused to learn how to use a word processing application on a computer were “left behind” because now almost all documentation is written digitally.
AI is here to stay
LLMs are not AI.
Don’t be daft.
it’s like your face mate, it can’t be helped.
I never said they were 🤔
LLMs are a form of AI.
And both LLMs and other AI are here to stay whether you like it or not.
llms are roided up chatbots. calling them AI is an insult to actual AI.
This pedantic argument annoys me so much. We’ve called basic ass decision trees for NPCs in games AI for a while now, any program that can make a decision based on data is an AI.
If you don’t like it, you’re more than free to provide the world with a true all-encompassing definition of intelligence that everyone can agree on, you’ll join all the others that tried.
good
