> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible.
I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that.
What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun), and programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks if you have a proper setup and relatively easy to find a new job when you need it (granted, the US seems to struggle with that specific point as of late, yet it remains true in the rest of the world).
And now, we're having a huge explosion of tools for developers, to build software that has to be maintained by developers, made by developers for developers.
If anything, it seems like Balmers plea of "Developers, developers, developers" has came true, and if there will be one profession left in 100 year when AI does everything for us (if the vibers are to be believed), then that'd probably be software developers and machine learning experts.
What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession that seems to be continuously growing and been doing so for at least 20 years?
Based on conversations with peers for the last ~3 years or so, some of retrained to become programmers, this doesn't seem to as absolute as you paint it out to be.
But as mentioned earlier, the situation in the US seems much more dire than elsewhere. People I know who entered the programming profession in South America, Europe and Asia for these last years don't seem to have more troubles than I had when I got started. Yes, it requires work, just like it did before.
> I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun)
In my Big Tech job, I sometimes forget that some people can really enjoy what they do. It seems like you're in a fortunate position of both high pay and high enjoyment. Congratulations! Out of curiosity, what do you work on?
Right now I'm doing consulting for two companies, maybe a couple of hours per week, mostly having downtime and trying to expand on my machine learning knowledge.
But in general, every job I've had has been "high pay and high enjoyment" even when I initially had "shit pay" compared to other programmers, and the product wasn't really fun, I was still programming, an activity I still love.
Compare this to the jobs I did before, where the physical toll makes it impossible to do anything after work as you're exhausted, and even if I got paid more than my first programming job, that your body is literally unable to move once you get home, makes the pay matter less and feel less.
But for a programmer, you can literally sit still all day, have some meetings in a warm office, talk with some people, type some things into a document, sit and think for a while, and in the end of the month you get a paycheck.
If you never worked in another profession, I think you ("The Programmer") don't realize how lucky you are compared to the rest of the world.
The job of a programmer is, and has always been, 50% making our job obsolete (through various forms of automation) and 50% ensuring our job security (through various forms of abstraction).
Across ~10 jobs or so, mostly as a employee of 5-100 person companies, sometimes as a consultant, sometimes as a freelancer, but always with a comfy paycheck compared to any other career, and never as taxing (mental and physical) as the physical labor I did before I was a programmer, and that some of my peers are still doing.
Of course, there is always exceptions, like programmers who need to hike to volcanos to setup sensors and what not, but generally, programmers have one of the most comfortable jobs on the planet today. If you're a programmer, I think it should come relatively easy to acknowledge this.
Sure, it's mostly comfy and well-paid. But like with physical labor, there are jobs/projects that are easy and not as taxing, and jobs that are harder and more taxing (in this case mentally).
> programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks if you have a proper setup and relatively easy to find a new job when you need it
Not in where I live though. Competition is fierce, both in industry and academia, for most posts being saturated and most employees face "HR optimization" in their late 30s. Not to mention working over time, and its physical consequences.
Again, compare this to other professions, don't look at in isolation, and you'll see why you're still (or will have, seems you're a student still) having a much more pleasant life than others.
Again, sucks to be in the US as a programmer today maybe, but this isn't true elsewhere in the world, and especially not if you already have at least some experience.
> Definitely true in western Europe, and finding a job is extremely hard for the vast majority of non expert devs.
I don't know what else to say except that hasn't been my experience personally, nor the experience of my acquaintances who've re-skilled to become programmers these last few years, in Western Europe.
> What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun)
You do realise your position of luck is not normal, right? This is not how your average Techie 2025 is.
I don't know what "position of luck" you're talking about, it's been dedicated effort to practice programming and suffer through a lot of shit until I got my first comfy programming job.
And even if I'm experienced now, I still have peers and acquaintances who are getting into the industry, I'm not sitting in my office with my eyes closed exactly.
Well, speaking just for central Europe, it is pretty average. Sure, entry-level positions are different story, but anyone with at least few years for work experience can find reasonably payed job fairly quickly.
That’s probably because the definition of ‘average techie’ has been on a rapid downward trajectory for years? You can justify the waste when money is free. Not when you need them to do something.
> What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"?
I'm not paid enough to clean up shit after an AI. Behind an intern or junior? Sure, I enjoy that because I can tell them how shit works, where they went off the rails, and I can be sure they will not repeat that mistake and be better programmers afterwards.
But an AI? Oh good luck with that and good luck dealing with the "updates" that get forced upon you. Fuck all of that, I'm out.
> I'm not paid enough to clean up shit after an AI.
I enjoy making things work better. I'm lucky in that, because there's always been more brownfield work than greenfield work. I think of it as being an editor, not an author.
Hacking into vibe code with a machete is kinda fun.
Considering we surely have wildly different experiences and contexts, you could almost say we live on the same planet, but it looks very different to each and one of us :)
I really enjoyed how your words made me _feel._ They encouraged me to "keep fighting the good fight" when it comes to avoiding social media, et. al.
I do Vibe Code occasionally, Claude did a decent job with Terraform and SaltStack recently, but the words ring true in my head about how AI weakens my thinking, especially when it comes to Python or any programming language. Tread carefully indeed. And reading a book does help - I've been tearing through the Dune books after putting them off too long at my brother's recommendation. Very interesting reflections in those books on power/human nature that may apply in some ways to our current predicament.
At any rate, thank you for the thoughtful & eloquent words of caution.
> AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence.
Exactly. You can see that with the proliferation of chickenized reverse centaurs[1] in all kinds of jobs. Getting rid of the free-willed human in the loop is the aim now that bosses/stakeholders have seen the light.
If you are a software engineere, you can leverage AI a lot better to write code than anyone else.
The complexity of good code, is still complicated.
which means 1. if software development is really solved, everyone else also gets a huge problem (ceo, cto, accountants, designers, etc. etc.) so we are in the back of the ai doomsday line.
And 2. it allows YOU to leverage AI a lot better which can enable you to create your own product.
In my startup, we leverage AI and we are not worried that another company just does the same thing because even if they do, we know how to write good code and architecture and we are also using AI. So we will always be ahead.
I've seen the argument that computers let us prop up and even scale governmental systems that would have long since collapsed under their own weight if they’d remained manual more than once. I'm not sure I buy it, but computation undoubtedly shapes society.
The author does seem quite keen on computers, but they've been "getting rid of the free-willed human in the loop" for decades. I think there might be some unexamined bias here.
I'm not even saying the core argument's wrong, exactly - clearly, tools build systems ("...and systems kill" - Crass). I guess I'm saying tools are value neutral. Guns don't kill people. So this argument against LLMs is an argument against all tools, unless you can explain how LLMs are a unique category of tool?
(Aside: calling out the lever sounds silly, but I think it's actually a great example. You can't do monumental architecture without levers, and the point in history where we start doing that is also the point where serious surplus extraction kicks in. I don't think that's coincidence).
In my third world country, motorbikes, scooters, etc have exploded in popularity and use in the past decade. have many people riding these things have made the roads much more dangerous for all, but particularly for them. They keep dying by the hundreds per month, not only just due the fact that hey choose to ride them at all, but how they ride them: on busy high speed highways, weaving between lanes all the time, swerving in front of speeding cars, with barely any protective equipment whatsoever.A car crash is frequently very survivable, and motorcycle crash, not so much. Even if you survive the initial collision, the probability of another vehicle running you over is very high on a busy highway.
On would think, given the clear evidence for how dangerous these things are, why do people (1) ride them at all on the highway, and (2) in such a dangerous manner? One might excuse (1) by recognizing that many are poor and can't buy a car, and the motorbikes represent economic possibility: for use in courier business, of being able to work much further from home, etc.
But here is the thing about (2), A motorbike wants to be ridden that way. No matter how well the rider recognizes the danger, there is only so much time can pass before the sheer expediency of riding that way overrides any sense of due caution. Where it would be safer to stop or keep to a fixed lane without any sudden movements, the rider thinks of the inconvenience of stopping, does a quick mental comparison it to the (in their minds) the minuscule additional risk, and carries on. Stopping or keeping to a proper lane in a car require far less discipline than doing that on a motorbike.
So this is what people mean when they say tech is not value neutral. The tech can theoretically be used in many ways. But some forms of use are so aligned with the form of the tech that in practice it shapes behavior.
> The author does seem quite keen on computers, but they've been "getting rid of the free-willed human in the loop" for decades. I think there might be some unexamined bias here.
Certainly it's biased. I'm not the author, but to me there's a huge difference between computer/software as a tool, designed and planned, with known deterministic behavior/functionality, then put in the hands of humans, vs automating agency. The former I see as a pretty straightforward expansion of humanity's long-standing relationship with tools, from simple sticks to hand axes to chainsaws. The sort of automation AI-hype seems focused on doesn't have a great parallel in history. We're talking about building a statistical system to replace the human wielding the tool, mostly so that companies don't have to worry about hiring employees. Even if the machine does a terrible job and most of humanity, former workers and current users, all suffer, the bet is that it will be worth the cost savings.
ML is very cool technology, and clearly one of the major frontiers of human progress. At this stage though, I wish the effort on the packaging side was being spent on wrapping the technology in the form of reliable capabilities for humans to call on. Stuff like OCR at the OS level or "separate tracks" buttons in audio editors. The market has decided instead that the majority of our collective effort should go towards automated liability-sinks and replacing jobs with automation that doesn't work reliably.
And the end state doesn't even make sense. If all this capital investment does achieve breakthroughs and creat true AGI, do investors really think they'll see returns? They'll have destroyed the entire concept of an economy. The only way to leverage power at that point would be to try to exercise control over a robot army or something similarly sci-fi and ridiculous.
It’s a good thing that there’s centuries of philosophy on that subject and the general consensus is that no, tools are not “neutral” and do shape the systems they interact with, sometimes against the will of those wielding these tools.
I am surprised (and also kind of not) to see this kind of tech hate on HN of all places.
Would you prefer we heat our homes by burning wood, carry water from the nearby spring, and ride horses to visit relatives?
Progress is progress, and has always changed things. Its funny that apparently, "progressive" left-leaning people are actually so conservative at the core.
So far, in my book, the advancements in the last 100 or even more years have mostly always brought us things I wouldn't want to miss these days. But maybe some people would be happier to go back to the dark ages...
> Progress is progress, and has always changed things. Its funny that apparently, "progressive" left-leaning people are actually so conservative at the core.
I am surprised (and also kind of not) to see this lack of critical reflection on HN of all places.
Saying "progress is progress" serves nobody, except those who drive "progress" in directions that benefits them. All you do by saying "has always changed things" is taking "change" at face value, assuming it's something completely out of your control, and to be accepted without any questioning it's source, it's ways or its effects.
> So far, in my book, the advancements in the last 100 or even more years have mostly always brought us things I wouldn't want to miss these days. But maybe some people would be happier to go back to the dark ages...
Amazing depiction of extremes as the only possible outcomes. Either take everything that is thrown at us, or go back into a supposed "dark age" (which, BTW, is nowadays understood to not have been that "dark" at all) . This, again, doesn't help have a proper discussion about the effects of technology and how it comes to be the way it is.
A tool is a tool. These AI critics sound to me like people who have hit their finger with a hammer, and now advocate against using them altogether. Yes, tech has always had two sides. Our "job" as humans is to pick the good parts, and avoid the bad. Nothing new, nothing exceptional.
And then there is the moderate position: Don't be the person refusing the use a calculator / PC / mobile phone / AI. Regularly give the new tool a chance and check if improvements are useful for specific tasks. And carry on with your life.
So, you want to rebel and stay as organic-minded human? But the what exactly is "being a human"?
The biological senses and abilities were constantly augmented throughput the centuries, pushing the organic human to hide inside deeper layers of what you call as yourself.
What's yourself without your material possessions and social connections? There is no such thing as yourself without these.
Now let's wind back. Why resist just one more layer of augmentation of our senses, mind and physical abilities?
I see this play out everywhere actually be it code, thoughts, even intent, atomized for the capital engine.
Its more than a productivity hack, its a subtle power shift decisions getting abstracted, agency getting diluted
Opting in to weirdness and curiosity is the only bug worth keeping which will eventually become a norm
Well, there are two aspects from which I can react to this post.
The first aspect is the “I don’t touch AI with a stick”. AI is a tool. Nobody is obligated to touch it obviously, but it is useful in certain situations. So I disagree with the author’a position to avoid using AI. It reads like stubbornness for the sake of avoiding new tech.
The second angle is the “bigtech corporate control” angle. And honestly, I don’t get this argument at all. Computers and the digital world has created the biggest distopian world we have ever witnessed. From absurd amounts of misinformation and propaganda fueled by bot farms operated at government levels, all the way to digital surveillance tech. You have that strong of an opinion against big tech and digital surveillance, blaming AI for that, while enjoying the other perils of big tech, is virtue signaling.
As a crappy programmer I love AI! Right now I'm focusing on building up my Math knowledge, general CS knowledge and ML knowledge. In the future, knowing how to read code and understanding it may be more important than writing it.
I think its amazing what giant vector matrices can do with a little code.
If as the author suggests AI is inherently designed to further concentrate control and capital, that may be so, but that is also the aim of every business.
The big tech will build out compute in a never seen speed and we will reach 2e29 Flops faster than ever.
Big tech is competing with each other and they are the ones with the real money in our capitalistic world but even if they would find some slow down between each others, countries are also now competing.
In the next 4 years and the massive build out of compute, we will see a lot clearer how the progress will go.
And either we hit obvous limitations or not.
If we will not see an obvious limitation, fionas opinion will have 0 relevance.
The best chance for everyone is to keep a very very close eye on AI to either make the right decisions (not buying that house with a line of credit; creating your own product a lot faster thanks to ai, ...) or be aware what is coming.
Everytime I read one of these "I don't use AI" posts, the content is either "my code is handcrafted in a mountain spring and blessed by the universe itself, so no AI can match it", or "everything different from what I do is technofascism or <insert politics rant here>". Maybe Im missing something, but tech is controlled by a handful of companies - always have been; and sometimes code is just code, and AI is just a tool. What am I missing?
I was embarrassed recently to realize that almost all the code I create these days is written by AIs. Then I realized that’s OK. It’s a tool, and I’m making effective use of it. My job was to solve problems, not to write code.
I have a little pet theory brewing. Corporate work claims that we hire junior devs who become intermediate devs, who then become senior devs. The doomsday crowd claim that AI has replaced junior and intermediate devs, and is coming for the senior devs next.
This has felt off to me because I do way more than just code. Business users don’t want get into the details of building software. They want a guy like me to handle that.
I know how to talk to non-technical SMEs and extract their real requirements. I understand how to translate this into architecture decisions that align with the broader org. I know how to map it into a plan that meets those org objectives. And so on.
I think that really what happens is nerds exist and through osmosis a few of them become senior developers. They in turn have junior and intermediate assistant developers to help them deliver. Sometimes those assistants turn out to be nerds themselves, and they spontaneously transmute into senior developers!
AI is replacing those assistant human developers, but we will still need the senior developers because most business people want to sit with a real human being to solve their problem.
I will, however, get worried when AIs start running businesses. Then we are in trouble.
You are not missing much. Yes there will be situations where AI won’t be helpful, but that’s not a majority
Used right, Claude Code is actually very impressive. You just have to already be a programmer to use it right - divide the problem into small chunks yourself, instruct it to work on the small chunks.
Second example - there is a certain expectation of language in American professional communication. As a non native speaker I can tell you that not following that expectation has real impact on a career. AI has been transformational, writing an email myself and asking it to ‘make this into American professional english’
There's a lot of overlap between "AI is evil megacapitalism" and "AI is ineffective", and I never understood the latter, but I am increasingly arriving to the understanding that the latter claim isn't real, it's just a soldier in the war being fought over the former.
We shape the world through our choices, generally under the umbrella of deterministic systems. AI is non-deterministic, but instead amplifies the concerns by a few wealthy corporations / individuals.
So is AI effective at generating marketing material or propagating arguably vapid value systems in the face of ecological, cultural, and economic crisis? I'd argue yes. But effective also depends on an intention, and that's not my intention, so it's not as effective for me.
I think we need more "manual" choice, and more agency.
Ineffective at what? Writing good code, or producing any sort of valuable insight? Yes, it's ineffective. Writing unmaintainable slop at line rate? Or writing internet-filling spam, or propagating their owners' points of view? Very effective.
I just think the things they are effective at are a net negative for most of us.
Not much. Even the argument that AI is another tool to strip people of power is not that great.
It's possible to use AI chatbots against the system of power, to help detect and point out manipulation, or lack of nuance in arguments, or political texts. To help decipher legalese in contracts, or point out problematic passages in terms of use. To help with interactions with the sate, even non-trivial ones like FOI requests, or disputing information disclosure rejections, etc.
AI tools can be used to help against the systems of power.
> LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles
What a loaded sentence lol. Implying being a hacker has some correlation with being progressive. And implying somehow anti-AI is progressive.
> AI systems being egregiously resource intensive is not a side effect — it’s the point.
Really? So we're not going to see AI users celebrating over how much less power DeepSeek used, right?
Anyway guess what else is resource intensive? Making chips. Follow the line of logic you will find computers consolidate powers and real progressive hackers should use pencil and paper only.
Back to the first paragraph...
> almost like a reflex, was a self-justification of why the way they use these tools is fine, while other approaches were reckless.
The irony is off the roof. This article is essentially: when I use computational power how I like, it's being a hacker. When others use computational power their way, it's being fascists.
> Implying being a hacker has some correlation with being progressive
I didn't read it that way. "Progressive hacker circles" doesn't imply that all hackers are progressive, it can just be distinguishing progressive circles from conservative ones.
> Implying being a hacker has some correlation with being progressive
I mean, yeah, that kind of checks out. The quoted part doesn't make much sense to me, but that most hackers are progressives (as in "enact progress by change", not the twisted American version) should hardly come as a surprise. The opposite would be that a hacker could be a conservative (again, not the US version, but the global definition; "reluctant to change"), which is pretty much a oxymoron. Best would be to eschew political/ideological labels in total, and just say we hackers are unpolitical :)
Pro/regressive are terms that are highly contextual. Progress for progress’ sake alone can move anything forward. I would argue the progression of the attention economy has been extremely negative for most of the human race, yet that is “progressing.”
In this instance, it’s just claiming turf for the political movement in the US that has spent the last century:
- inventing scientific racism and (after that was debunked) reinventing other academic pretenses to institutionalize race-base governance and society
- forcibly sterilizing people with mental illnesses until the 1970s, through 2005 via coercion, and until the present via lies, fake studies, and ideological subversion
- being outspokenly antisemitic
Personally, I think it’s a moral failing we allow such vile people to pontificate about virtues without being booed out of the room.
The typical CCC / Hackerspace - circle is kinda progressive / left leaning. At least in my experience. Which I think she(or he?) was implying. Of course not every hacker is :)
I don't think I'm going to take seriously an argument that uses Marx as its foundation but I'm glad that the pronouns crowd has had to move on from finger wagging as their only rhetorical stance.
> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible.
I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that.
What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun), and programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks if you have a proper setup and relatively easy to find a new job when you need it (granted, the US seems to struggle with that specific point as of late, yet it remains true in the rest of the world).
And now, we're having a huge explosion of tools for developers, to build software that has to be maintained by developers, made by developers for developers.
If anything, it seems like Balmers plea of "Developers, developers, developers" has came true, and if there will be one profession left in 100 year when AI does everything for us (if the vibers are to be believed), then that'd probably be software developers and machine learning experts.
What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession that seems to be continuously growing and been doing so for at least 20 years?
> What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession that seems to be continuously growing
A lot of newly skilled job applicants can't find anything in the job market right now.
Because tech corps overhired[0] when the interest rate was low.
Even after the layoffs, most big tech corps still have more employees today than they did in 2020.
[0]: https://www.dw.com/en/could-layoffs-in-tech-jobs-spread-to-r...
Based on conversations with peers for the last ~3 years or so, some of retrained to become programmers, this doesn't seem to as absolute as you paint it out to be.
But as mentioned earlier, the situation in the US seems much more dire than elsewhere. People I know who entered the programming profession in South America, Europe and Asia for these last years don't seem to have more troubles than I had when I got started. Yes, it requires work, just like it did before.
Nah it's pretty bad, but congrats on being an outlier.
> I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun)
In my Big Tech job, I sometimes forget that some people can really enjoy what they do. It seems like you're in a fortunate position of both high pay and high enjoyment. Congratulations! Out of curiosity, what do you work on?
Right now I'm doing consulting for two companies, maybe a couple of hours per week, mostly having downtime and trying to expand on my machine learning knowledge.
But in general, every job I've had has been "high pay and high enjoyment" even when I initially had "shit pay" compared to other programmers, and the product wasn't really fun, I was still programming, an activity I still love.
Compare this to the jobs I did before, where the physical toll makes it impossible to do anything after work as you're exhausted, and even if I got paid more than my first programming job, that your body is literally unable to move once you get home, makes the pay matter less and feel less.
But for a programmer, you can literally sit still all day, have some meetings in a warm office, talk with some people, type some things into a document, sit and think for a while, and in the end of the month you get a paycheck.
If you never worked in another profession, I think you ("The Programmer") don't realize how lucky you are compared to the rest of the world.
The job of a programmer is, and has always been, 50% making our job obsolete (through various forms of automation) and 50% ensuring our job security (through various forms of abstraction).
> programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks...
I don't know what kind of work you do but this depends a lot on what kind of projects you work on
Across ~10 jobs or so, mostly as a employee of 5-100 person companies, sometimes as a consultant, sometimes as a freelancer, but always with a comfy paycheck compared to any other career, and never as taxing (mental and physical) as the physical labor I did before I was a programmer, and that some of my peers are still doing.
Of course, there is always exceptions, like programmers who need to hike to volcanos to setup sensors and what not, but generally, programmers have one of the most comfortable jobs on the planet today. If you're a programmer, I think it should come relatively easy to acknowledge this.
Sure, it's mostly comfy and well-paid. But like with physical labor, there are jobs/projects that are easy and not as taxing, and jobs that are harder and more taxing (in this case mentally).
> programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks if you have a proper setup and relatively easy to find a new job when you need it
Not in where I live though. Competition is fierce, both in industry and academia, for most posts being saturated and most employees face "HR optimization" in their late 30s. Not to mention working over time, and its physical consequences.
Again, compare this to other professions, don't look at in isolation, and you'll see why you're still (or will have, seems you're a student still) having a much more pleasant life than others.
There’s been over 1 million people laid off in tech in the past 4 years
https://www.trueup.io/layoffs
Again, sucks to be in the US as a programmer today maybe, but this isn't true elsewhere in the world, and especially not if you already have at least some experience.
Definitely true in western Europe, and finding a job is extremely hard for the vast majority of non expert devs.
Of course if you're in south eastern europe or in south asia where all the jobs are being offshored you're having the time of your life.
> Definitely true in western Europe, and finding a job is extremely hard for the vast majority of non expert devs.
I don't know what else to say except that hasn't been my experience personally, nor the experience of my acquaintances who've re-skilled to become programmers these last few years, in Western Europe.
Do you base your entire worldview purely on your own personal experience?
> What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun)
You do realise your position of luck is not normal, right? This is not how your average Techie 2025 is.
I don't know what "position of luck" you're talking about, it's been dedicated effort to practice programming and suffer through a lot of shit until I got my first comfy programming job.
And even if I'm experienced now, I still have peers and acquaintances who are getting into the industry, I'm not sitting in my office with my eyes closed exactly.
Specially for new developers. Entry level jobs have practically evaporated.
Well, speaking just for central Europe, it is pretty average. Sure, entry-level positions are different story, but anyone with at least few years for work experience can find reasonably payed job fairly quickly.
Every good 'techie' around me has it good.
That’s probably because the definition of ‘average techie’ has been on a rapid downward trajectory for years? You can justify the waste when money is free. Not when you need them to do something.
> What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"?
I'm not paid enough to clean up shit after an AI. Behind an intern or junior? Sure, I enjoy that because I can tell them how shit works, where they went off the rails, and I can be sure they will not repeat that mistake and be better programmers afterwards.
But an AI? Oh good luck with that and good luck dealing with the "updates" that get forced upon you. Fuck all of that, I'm out.
> I'm not paid enough to clean up shit after an AI.
I enjoy making things work better. I'm lucky in that, because there's always been more brownfield work than greenfield work. I think of it as being an editor, not an author.
Hacking into vibe code with a machete is kinda fun.
Are we living on the same planet?
Considering we surely have wildly different experiences and contexts, you could almost say we live on the same planet, but it looks very different to each and one of us :)
No... :-)
I like the "what’s left" part of the article. It’s applicable regardless of your preferred flavor of resentment about where things are going.
I really enjoyed how your words made me _feel._ They encouraged me to "keep fighting the good fight" when it comes to avoiding social media, et. al.
I do Vibe Code occasionally, Claude did a decent job with Terraform and SaltStack recently, but the words ring true in my head about how AI weakens my thinking, especially when it comes to Python or any programming language. Tread carefully indeed. And reading a book does help - I've been tearing through the Dune books after putting them off too long at my brother's recommendation. Very interesting reflections in those books on power/human nature that may apply in some ways to our current predicament.
At any rate, thank you for the thoughtful & eloquent words of caution.
> AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence.
Exactly. You can see that with the proliferation of chickenized reverse centaurs[1] in all kinds of jobs. Getting rid of the free-willed human in the loop is the aim now that bosses/stakeholders have seen the light.
[1] https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenize...
If you are a software engineere, you can leverage AI a lot better to write code than anyone else.
The complexity of good code, is still complicated.
which means 1. if software development is really solved, everyone else also gets a huge problem (ceo, cto, accountants, designers, etc. etc.) so we are in the back of the ai doomsday line.
And 2. it allows YOU to leverage AI a lot better which can enable you to create your own product.
In my startup, we leverage AI and we are not worried that another company just does the same thing because even if they do, we know how to write good code and architecture and we are also using AI. So we will always be ahead.
Now apply that thinking to computers. Or levers.
I've seen the argument that computers let us prop up and even scale governmental systems that would have long since collapsed under their own weight if they’d remained manual more than once. I'm not sure I buy it, but computation undoubtedly shapes society.
The author does seem quite keen on computers, but they've been "getting rid of the free-willed human in the loop" for decades. I think there might be some unexamined bias here.
I'm not even saying the core argument's wrong, exactly - clearly, tools build systems ("...and systems kill" - Crass). I guess I'm saying tools are value neutral. Guns don't kill people. So this argument against LLMs is an argument against all tools, unless you can explain how LLMs are a unique category of tool?
(Aside: calling out the lever sounds silly, but I think it's actually a great example. You can't do monumental architecture without levers, and the point in history where we start doing that is also the point where serious surplus extraction kicks in. I don't think that's coincidence).
Tools are not value neutral in any way.
In my third world country, motorbikes, scooters, etc have exploded in popularity and use in the past decade. have many people riding these things have made the roads much more dangerous for all, but particularly for them. They keep dying by the hundreds per month, not only just due the fact that hey choose to ride them at all, but how they ride them: on busy high speed highways, weaving between lanes all the time, swerving in front of speeding cars, with barely any protective equipment whatsoever.A car crash is frequently very survivable, and motorcycle crash, not so much. Even if you survive the initial collision, the probability of another vehicle running you over is very high on a busy highway.
On would think, given the clear evidence for how dangerous these things are, why do people (1) ride them at all on the highway, and (2) in such a dangerous manner? One might excuse (1) by recognizing that many are poor and can't buy a car, and the motorbikes represent economic possibility: for use in courier business, of being able to work much further from home, etc.
But here is the thing about (2), A motorbike wants to be ridden that way. No matter how well the rider recognizes the danger, there is only so much time can pass before the sheer expediency of riding that way overrides any sense of due caution. Where it would be safer to stop or keep to a fixed lane without any sudden movements, the rider thinks of the inconvenience of stopping, does a quick mental comparison it to the (in their minds) the minuscule additional risk, and carries on. Stopping or keeping to a proper lane in a car require far less discipline than doing that on a motorbike.
So this is what people mean when they say tech is not value neutral. The tech can theoretically be used in many ways. But some forms of use are so aligned with the form of the tech that in practice it shapes behavior.
> The author does seem quite keen on computers, but they've been "getting rid of the free-willed human in the loop" for decades. I think there might be some unexamined bias here.
Certainly it's biased. I'm not the author, but to me there's a huge difference between computer/software as a tool, designed and planned, with known deterministic behavior/functionality, then put in the hands of humans, vs automating agency. The former I see as a pretty straightforward expansion of humanity's long-standing relationship with tools, from simple sticks to hand axes to chainsaws. The sort of automation AI-hype seems focused on doesn't have a great parallel in history. We're talking about building a statistical system to replace the human wielding the tool, mostly so that companies don't have to worry about hiring employees. Even if the machine does a terrible job and most of humanity, former workers and current users, all suffer, the bet is that it will be worth the cost savings.
ML is very cool technology, and clearly one of the major frontiers of human progress. At this stage though, I wish the effort on the packaging side was being spent on wrapping the technology in the form of reliable capabilities for humans to call on. Stuff like OCR at the OS level or "separate tracks" buttons in audio editors. The market has decided instead that the majority of our collective effort should go towards automated liability-sinks and replacing jobs with automation that doesn't work reliably.
And the end state doesn't even make sense. If all this capital investment does achieve breakthroughs and creat true AGI, do investors really think they'll see returns? They'll have destroyed the entire concept of an economy. The only way to leverage power at that point would be to try to exercise control over a robot army or something similarly sci-fi and ridiculous.
It’s a good thing that there’s centuries of philosophy on that subject and the general consensus is that no, tools are not “neutral” and do shape the systems they interact with, sometimes against the will of those wielding these tools.
See the nuclear bomb for an example.
How is that different from making manual computation obsolete with the help of excel?
Sounds like Manna control system: https://marshallbrain.com/manna
I am surprised (and also kind of not) to see this kind of tech hate on HN of all places.
Would you prefer we heat our homes by burning wood, carry water from the nearby spring, and ride horses to visit relatives?
Progress is progress, and has always changed things. Its funny that apparently, "progressive" left-leaning people are actually so conservative at the core.
So far, in my book, the advancements in the last 100 or even more years have mostly always brought us things I wouldn't want to miss these days. But maybe some people would be happier to go back to the dark ages...
> Progress is progress, and has always changed things. Its funny that apparently, "progressive" left-leaning people are actually so conservative at the core.
I am surprised (and also kind of not) to see this lack of critical reflection on HN of all places.
Saying "progress is progress" serves nobody, except those who drive "progress" in directions that benefits them. All you do by saying "has always changed things" is taking "change" at face value, assuming it's something completely out of your control, and to be accepted without any questioning it's source, it's ways or its effects.
> So far, in my book, the advancements in the last 100 or even more years have mostly always brought us things I wouldn't want to miss these days. But maybe some people would be happier to go back to the dark ages...
Amazing depiction of extremes as the only possible outcomes. Either take everything that is thrown at us, or go back into a supposed "dark age" (which, BTW, is nowadays understood to not have been that "dark" at all) . This, again, doesn't help have a proper discussion about the effects of technology and how it comes to be the way it is.
"You don't like $instance_of_X? You must want to get rid of all $X" has got to be one of the most intellectually lazy things you could say.
You don't like leaded gasoline? You must want us to walk everywhere. Come on...
A tool is a tool. These AI critics sound to me like people who have hit their finger with a hammer, and now advocate against using them altogether. Yes, tech has always had two sides. Our "job" as humans is to pick the good parts, and avoid the bad. Nothing new, nothing exceptional.
And then there is the moderate position: Don't be the person refusing the use a calculator / PC / mobile phone / AI. Regularly give the new tool a chance and check if improvements are useful for specific tasks. And carry on with your life.
If a calculator gives me 5 when I do 2+2, I throw it away.
If a PC crashes when I uses more than 20% of its soldered memory, i throw it away.
If a mobile phone refuses to connect to a cellular tower, I get another one.
What I want from my tools is reliability. Which is a spectrum, but LLMs are very much on the lower end.
So, you want to rebel and stay as organic-minded human? But the what exactly is "being a human"?
The biological senses and abilities were constantly augmented throughput the centuries, pushing the organic human to hide inside deeper layers of what you call as yourself.
What's yourself without your material possessions and social connections? There is no such thing as yourself without these.
Now let's wind back. Why resist just one more layer of augmentation of our senses, mind and physical abilities?
> What's yourself without your material possessions and social connections? There is no such thing as yourself without these.
perhaps a being that has the capacity for intention and will?
I see this play out everywhere actually be it code, thoughts, even intent, atomized for the capital engine. Its more than a productivity hack, its a subtle power shift decisions getting abstracted, agency getting diluted
Opting in to weirdness and curiosity is the only bug worth keeping which will eventually become a norm
Well, there are two aspects from which I can react to this post.
The first aspect is the “I don’t touch AI with a stick”. AI is a tool. Nobody is obligated to touch it obviously, but it is useful in certain situations. So I disagree with the author’a position to avoid using AI. It reads like stubbornness for the sake of avoiding new tech.
The second angle is the “bigtech corporate control” angle. And honestly, I don’t get this argument at all. Computers and the digital world has created the biggest distopian world we have ever witnessed. From absurd amounts of misinformation and propaganda fueled by bot farms operated at government levels, all the way to digital surveillance tech. You have that strong of an opinion against big tech and digital surveillance, blaming AI for that, while enjoying the other perils of big tech, is virtue signaling.
I’m genuinely not sure if that post is supposed to be some funny parody. Either way I did have a good laugh reading it.
The main thing is everyone seems to hate reading someone else ChatGPT while we are still eager to share ours to others as it’s some sort of oracle.
What's with these kinda people and their obsession with the pejorative "fascist". Overused to the point where it means nothing.
As a crappy programmer I love AI! Right now I'm focusing on building up my Math knowledge, general CS knowledge and ML knowledge. In the future, knowing how to read code and understanding it may be more important than writing it.
I think its amazing what giant vector matrices can do with a little code.
If as the author suggests AI is inherently designed to further concentrate control and capital, that may be so, but that is also the aim of every business.
Its ignorant. Thats what it is.
The big tech will build out compute in a never seen speed and we will reach 2e29 Flops faster than ever.
Big tech is competing with each other and they are the ones with the real money in our capitalistic world but even if they would find some slow down between each others, countries are also now competing.
In the next 4 years and the massive build out of compute, we will see a lot clearer how the progress will go.
And either we hit obvous limitations or not.
If we will not see an obvious limitation, fionas opinion will have 0 relevance.
The best chance for everyone is to keep a very very close eye on AI to either make the right decisions (not buying that house with a line of credit; creating your own product a lot faster thanks to ai, ...) or be aware what is coming.
Thanks for the fish and enjoy the ride.
Does the author feel the same way of running the models locally?
Its interesting how people are still very positive about Marx’s labour theory of value, despite it being very much of its time and very discredited.
Everytime I read one of these "I don't use AI" posts, the content is either "my code is handcrafted in a mountain spring and blessed by the universe itself, so no AI can match it", or "everything different from what I do is technofascism or <insert politics rant here>". Maybe Im missing something, but tech is controlled by a handful of companies - always have been; and sometimes code is just code, and AI is just a tool. What am I missing?
I was embarrassed recently to realize that almost all the code I create these days is written by AIs. Then I realized that’s OK. It’s a tool, and I’m making effective use of it. My job was to solve problems, not to write code.
I have a little pet theory brewing. Corporate work claims that we hire junior devs who become intermediate devs, who then become senior devs. The doomsday crowd claim that AI has replaced junior and intermediate devs, and is coming for the senior devs next.
This has felt off to me because I do way more than just code. Business users don’t want get into the details of building software. They want a guy like me to handle that.
I know how to talk to non-technical SMEs and extract their real requirements. I understand how to translate this into architecture decisions that align with the broader org. I know how to map it into a plan that meets those org objectives. And so on.
I think that really what happens is nerds exist and through osmosis a few of them become senior developers. They in turn have junior and intermediate assistant developers to help them deliver. Sometimes those assistants turn out to be nerds themselves, and they spontaneously transmute into senior developers!
AI is replacing those assistant human developers, but we will still need the senior developers because most business people want to sit with a real human being to solve their problem.
I will, however, get worried when AIs start running businesses. Then we are in trouble.
> Maybe Im missing something, but tech is controlled by a handful of companies - always have been;
The entire open source movement would like a word with you.
You are not missing much. Yes there will be situations where AI won’t be helpful, but that’s not a majority
Used right, Claude Code is actually very impressive. You just have to already be a programmer to use it right - divide the problem into small chunks yourself, instruct it to work on the small chunks.
Second example - there is a certain expectation of language in American professional communication. As a non native speaker I can tell you that not following that expectation has real impact on a career. AI has been transformational, writing an email myself and asking it to ‘make this into American professional english’
> What am I missing?
The youthful desire to rage against the machine?
I prefer eternally enslaving a machine to do my bidding over just raging at them.
There's a lot of overlap between "AI is evil megacapitalism" and "AI is ineffective", and I never understood the latter, but I am increasingly arriving to the understanding that the latter claim isn't real, it's just a soldier in the war being fought over the former.
I read the intersection as this:
We shape the world through our choices, generally under the umbrella of deterministic systems. AI is non-deterministic, but instead amplifies the concerns by a few wealthy corporations / individuals.
So is AI effective at generating marketing material or propagating arguably vapid value systems in the face of ecological, cultural, and economic crisis? I'd argue yes. But effective also depends on an intention, and that's not my intention, so it's not as effective for me.
I think we need more "manual" choice, and more agency.
Ineffective at what? Writing good code, or producing any sort of valuable insight? Yes, it's ineffective. Writing unmaintainable slop at line rate? Or writing internet-filling spam, or propagating their owners' points of view? Very effective.
I just think the things they are effective at are a net negative for most of us.
Exactly.
Not much. Even the argument that AI is another tool to strip people of power is not that great.
It's possible to use AI chatbots against the system of power, to help detect and point out manipulation, or lack of nuance in arguments, or political texts. To help decipher legalese in contracts, or point out problematic passages in terms of use. To help with interactions with the sate, even non-trivial ones like FOI requests, or disputing information disclosure rejections, etc.
AI tools can be used to help against the systems of power.
Yes, the black box that has been RLHF'd in god knows what way is surely going to help you gain power, and not its owners...
> LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles
What a loaded sentence lol. Implying being a hacker has some correlation with being progressive. And implying somehow anti-AI is progressive.
> AI systems being egregiously resource intensive is not a side effect — it’s the point.
Really? So we're not going to see AI users celebrating over how much less power DeepSeek used, right?
Anyway guess what else is resource intensive? Making chips. Follow the line of logic you will find computers consolidate powers and real progressive hackers should use pencil and paper only.
Back to the first paragraph...
> almost like a reflex, was a self-justification of why the way they use these tools is fine, while other approaches were reckless.
The irony is off the roof. This article is essentially: when I use computational power how I like, it's being a hacker. When others use computational power their way, it's being fascists.
> Implying being a hacker has some correlation with being progressive
I didn't read it that way. "Progressive hacker circles" doesn't imply that all hackers are progressive, it can just be distinguishing progressive circles from conservative ones.
> Implying being a hacker has some correlation with being progressive
I mean, yeah, that kind of checks out. The quoted part doesn't make much sense to me, but that most hackers are progressives (as in "enact progress by change", not the twisted American version) should hardly come as a surprise. The opposite would be that a hacker could be a conservative (again, not the US version, but the global definition; "reluctant to change"), which is pretty much a oxymoron. Best would be to eschew political/ideological labels in total, and just say we hackers are unpolitical :)
Pro/regressive are terms that are highly contextual. Progress for progress’ sake alone can move anything forward. I would argue the progression of the attention economy has been extremely negative for most of the human race, yet that is “progressing.”
In this instance, it’s just claiming turf for the political movement in the US that has spent the last century:
- inventing scientific racism and (after that was debunked) reinventing other academic pretenses to institutionalize race-base governance and society
- forcibly sterilizing people with mental illnesses until the 1970s, through 2005 via coercion, and until the present via lies, fake studies, and ideological subversion
- being outspokenly antisemitic
Personally, I think it’s a moral failing we allow such vile people to pontificate about virtues without being booed out of the room.
The typical CCC / Hackerspace - circle is kinda progressive / left leaning. At least in my experience. Which I think she(or he?) was implying. Of course not every hacker is :)
I don't think I'm going to take seriously an argument that uses Marx as its foundation but I'm glad that the pronouns crowd has had to move on from finger wagging as their only rhetorical stance.
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