- cross-posted to:
- pulse_of_truth@infosec.pub
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- pulse_of_truth@infosec.pub
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
The thing I hate the most about AI and it’s ease of access; the slow, painful death of the hacker soul—brought not by war or scarcity, but by convenience. By buttons. By bots. […]
There was once magic here. There was once madness.
Kids would stay up all night on IRC with bloodshot eyes, trying to render a cube in OpenGL without segfaulting their future. They cared. They would install Gentoo on a toaster just to see if it’d boot. They knew the smell of burnt voltage regulators and the exact line of assembly where Doom hit 10 FPS on their calculator. These were artists. They wrote code like jazz musicians—full of rage, precision, and divine chaos.
Now? We’re building a world where that curiosity gets lobotomized at the door. Some poor bastard—born to be great—is going to get told to “review this AI-generated patchset” for eight hours a day, until all that wonder calcifies into apathy. The terminal will become a spreadsheet. The debugger a coffin.
Unusually well-written piece on the threat AI poses to programming as an art form.
Old man shakes hands at clouds.
You can still do things the old way, AI existing does not impact your ability to do so.
People still make mechanical watches by hand. People choose to carve things instead of 3D printing them. People choose to drive stick instead of automatic.
I think at most of the disdain comes from the business side. Sure I can opt out of AI at home but at work I’m constantly getting asked how AI has helped my productivity and potentially “graded” on how much or how effectively I use it. Business doesn’t care about your personal fulfillment, just your productivity, and if they grind you into dust to w acchere you no longer find any joy or motivation in your work they’ll get the next college graduate that’s already used AI for 80% of their assignments and wonder why quality has tanked, integrations are failing, security breaches are up, and energy costs have doubled.
A coworker that regularly uses AI code assistants asked me to review 78 brand new files he made. That really puts my back against the wall. Do I spend a day going through everything “the old way”? Do I ask AI to summarize each function to bridge the gap in knowledge? Do I ask it, file by file, if it sees any issues? Or do I just rubber stamp it because I should the million-dollar product my boss thinks I should use more than Google or official docs?
Tell your coworker to review it with his AI and then ship it.
PRs still need to be reasonable size for human review, regardless of how they were authored. IMO
Yeah but when you complain you are seen as slowing down progress. Your college wrote all of this useful code and now you are blocking it from being deployed? Our shareholders want to know that we are winning the AI race so we need to release this feature asap. How can we unblock this? I have added 3 new engineers to the team let’s make sure this gets out today!!
The man-hour myth will never die in the management class
Yeah like I’m a lot cooler on the AI hype than most but the articles argument is weak. This is the same shit people were saying when SO and Google were gaining traction. Surprisingly having one tool does not limit people from digging further into internals
The article is written by ai.
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted, it really reads like the most basic AI slop. It may not be, but if you asked AI to write this article, this is very close to what you would get.
With images such as “fullstack Rasputin”, “Kafkaesque time sink”, “LaTeX-laden elder scroll” and so on? Hell, no.
I love the ageism in this “but you’re just old” defence. It was comically bad when your parents told you to wear your seatbelt, and it’s weak now.
Yes hyper fixate on the meme reference rather than the actual argument that sits below it. Does it ever get tiresome to actively look for things to be pretend upset about?
Just in case: https://web.archive.org/web/20081208150839/https://www.globalnerdy.com/2008/09/30/old-man-yells-at-cloud/
You’re getting downvoted because you’re right and people don’t like that :)
They’re getting downvoted because they’re missing the point. It’s not about whether or not I can choose to do things the way I prefer. It’s about how newcomers exposure, and thus opportunity to get into these things, is limited. The arguments about cars or calculators don’t hold up for that exact reason: The existence of cars and calculators does not severely limit people’s exposure to the experience of walking or doing arithmetic.
He is right, but most will choose convenience. And I do believe that people in the future will suffer for it. The brain is like a muscle; you have to use it to keep your mind sharp. I fear that in the future will lack critical thinking or frustration tolerance because AI makes it so easy.
Congratulations. You just made the same thousand year old argument made against books. It’s amazing how some shit just won’t die.
Look we can make the same argument for all tech. I’m sure someone said the same thing about numbers when the abacus was invented, and then the same thing when the first calculators came out.
The existence of cars has not stopped people from running, because they realize that running is not only pleasurable but also necessary for our health.
As always the complacent masses will let their natural abilities atrophy and let tech take care of it. It doesn’t matter, they were never going to be better anyways because that would have required effort. Those who have the drive, curiosity and desire will still choose to do things the painstaking way, just like there’s people out there that choose to interact with their OS using the command line only in 2025 when GUIs exist and are less painful to use.
A common, recurrent experience for me 🤷🏽♂️