Disclaimer: This post was written May 2025, and the arguments apply to AI code capabilities at this time. The arguments around lack of competence are certainly likely to become less prevalent-while the parts about the desecration of the joys of programming, and fundamental human understanding of programming-are likely to become

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.

    • cabbage@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      8·
      1 day ago

      This is just obviously not the case to anyone who bothers reading it. It’s an original piece of writing.

      The only thing that could hint at AI here is the use of em-dashes, which is a bullshit tell—I use them all the time myself as well. They’re right there for anyone with a compose key on Linux.

      • PlantJam@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        1 day ago

        I’ve noticed people cite em-dashes as concrete proof that something is ai generated, but I’ve seen them be inserted/auto corrected by word plenty of times.

        • XeroxCool@lemmy.worldEnglish
          7·
          1 day ago

          I didn’t know they were illegal to use as a human. I use them often to tack on a related sentence fragment when a technical description is getting too long for the common smartphone user - at least, what I perceive to be too long

        • dustyData@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          1 day ago

          Good writers use em-dashes with care and intent. They’re a tool like everything else, and they abound in literature. That said, LLMs do tend to use it every time and everywhere.