The whole John Donne meditation the title is referencing:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were.
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee
(had to memorize it in High School, and its one of my favorites. It was written over 400 years ago and has aged quite well.)
Not totally related but The Tuft of Flowers by Robert Frost always reminds me Donne's poem.
The Tuft of Flowers
I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.
The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the levelled scene.
I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.
But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been,—alone,
‘As all must be,’ I said within my heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’
But as I said it, swift there passed me by
On noiseless wing a ‘wildered butterfly,
Seeking with memories grown dim o’er night
Some resting flower of yesterday’s delight.
And once I marked his flight go round and round,
As where some flower lay withering on the ground.
And then he flew as far as eye could see,
And then on tremulous wing came back to me.
I thought of questions that have no reply,
And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;
But he turned first, and led my eye to look
At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,
A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.
I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly weed when I came.
The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,
Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.
The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,
That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,
And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;
But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;
And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.
‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’
I'm also reminded if "I am a rock" by Simon and Garfunkel. Last two stanzas:
I have my books
And my poetry to protect me
I am shielded in my armor
Hiding in my room safe within my womb
I touch no one and no one touches me
I am a rock I am an island
And a rock feels no pain
And an island never cries
Hemingway also borrowed the penultimate line in For Whom The Bell Tolls. I also had to memorize this back in the day but I still stop to read it whenever I see it somewhere.
This poem is beautifully referenced in Mark Campbell's libretto for _As One_, an opera about the life and self acceptance of a trans woman, Hannah. Her class is also assigned the poem to study. This part destroys me every time:
*Hannah before, Hannah after, Conductor, Quartet:*
“…Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind…”
*Hannah before:*
I am the lone,
Dissenting voice
In the classroom.
I rise and declare
To a sea of non-islanders:
“It isn’t true,
I am an island.”
With all the experience
Of my fourteen years,
I see no other life
Than one apart,
Alone.
I need no one.
No one needs me.
I consigned myself
To my own island long ago.
Long ago.
I argue, and,
Satisfied by
My brilliant discourse on independence,
Sit back down.
The classroom is silent.
The teacher seems impressed.
(Or was she concerned?)
This is well put and something I think a lot of us struggle with.
The internet itself seems filled with the AI maximalists who have no end of hype for the latest prompt 'technique' or AI doomers that would skin you alive if you mention you used AI to make a photo once.
Quietly among peers I talk to there seems to be a very different group that exists: those that recognize AI is super valuable for getting a lot of work done but also feel that suddenly the work is so much less exciting than it was before.
Sure, there's the obvious "I enjoy the mechanics of programming" component that's gone but then there's also this general feeling that is hard to shake which feels a little deeper. I've wondered about it. Is it all the layoffs? The suddenly shaky economics for a lot of our companies? The uncertainty of the career's future in general?
I think the author has put their thumb on it well to describe it as a lack of intellectual community. That feels like at least part of it.
> then there's also this general feeling that is hard to shake which feels a little deeper. I've wondered about it.
I had an instance of the feeling (and also what the OP is describing) when writing a post about a technical question recently.
Previously, I'd have posted the question to HN or Stack Overflow - and, in addition to hopefully getting a solution, it might also become a resource for other people who had the same question. Finally, maybe there would have been some interesting discussion around the question.
Now: Ask the AI. Instant answer, question solved, but also, nothing else.
There was also a period before google where people would discuss questions and topics. You know what most often response I got after the ubiquity of google? “Idk, google it, it’s not that hard, why are you asking me?” I just think AI is the new version of Google. At least at work, I have now started to hear more often than not “just use ChatGPT, it’ll do it for you, we don’t need to talk about it.”
I may be able to stop asking AI, doesn’t mean those around me want me to.
I think the key question we are facing is that while we cannot control those around us - who often need to adopt AI as an economic necessity - how can we ensure we are still able to find and ensure intellectual communities thrive?
I think for me I have made a conscious decision to continue writing even though lots of writers now use AI. I also find myself gravitating towards platforms like substack which already have a network of people who value human artifacts.
Well, even after Google came about, I always liked to ask people so I can have their perspective on a question, and because most of my coworkers were normal people who enjoy telling their own opinion on something (not the kind of troglodyte that would say “just use ChatGPT, ... we don’t need to talk about it”).
> I may be able to stop asking AI, doesn’t mean those around me want me to.
> "Is it all the layoffs? The suddenly shaky economics for a lot of our companies? The uncertainty of the career's future in general?"
I'd say that those make up the majority of it. During the dotcom bust, there were waves of bankruptcies and layoffs, tech stock valuations crashing and staying stagnant, and people struggling to find jobs for months, etc. too and there was industry-wide doom and gloom and pundits proclaiming that software was no longer worth getting into. So all this angst seems very familiar. People would probably not be as bothered about AI if the the career outlook was positive.
For the last 2 years the frontier labs have been taking on funding at valuations that can only be justified if they replace vast swathes of human labor (and they have been pretty successful so far at automating large parts of software jobs, if not the jobs themselves yet), so the career doom and gloom is justified.
Genuine and good faith question: why can't you find intellectual community anywhere else?
A bit harsh, I know, but it seems like rather a waste if we consider ourselves software people and make that our whole. If AI has replaced the need for intellectual community in software, can't we just fulfill that same need elsewhere?
Why not join a book club, or find some other outlet which serves your intellectual curiosity? May this not turn out to be an opportunity?
I have not been attending as many tech meetups or keeping tabs on tech news like I used to. I've been spending more direct time with friends (tech and not). I've also found enjoyment spending a lot of time in more niche internet communities that are not actually about software dev but tend to attract a lot of software dev people. I've definitely noticed I'm spending far more time on other, non-tech hobbies of mine. It has been a while since I've done any OSS stuff or organized a tech meetup.
There's the whole component of identity you mentioned. I've considered myself a 'computer guy' since elementary school and it's been a bit odd to think what I would be if not that. I'd never have even entertained that idea until recently, but in the short term I think I have developed enough of a product mindset and business skills to stay useful in tech. Maybe I need to think of myself as a 'product guy' or 'entrepreneurial guy' instead.
If AI is soon able to replace everything we bring to the table as the maximalists are claiming then honestly all knowledge work go out the window pretty quickly. If that happens then that is its own scary thought and I don't think we're really ready for that economically / socially. I pay a lot of attention to my retirement funds lately.
So frankly, I think I'm instinctively doing what you suggest... But I think it's also natural to feel some weird feelings about it all!
>Why not join a book club, or find some other outlet which serves your intellectual curiosity?
It's the stakes. Sure it was fun and intellectually satisfying, but ultimately it meant something because there was a prestige that came with cultivating a skill that brought the ultimate external validation: abnormally high pay and prestige. It was the blending of those two things that made it so special. Not a soulless pursuit of money, but also not a naive pursuit of something for passion alone. You could spend your days diving deep into something fascinating, and it was highly lucrative to do so. Now it seems we're left to choose one or the other.
Firstly, in 25 years as a SWE, and 30 years as a musician and artist, I've always found conversations about tooling to be pretty boring. I'm much more interested in conversations about intentional logic and design. As in why something was implemented the way it was implemented, as opposed to how.
Intellectual communities rely on a combination of hobbyists and professionals. They discuss their tools and their results, but they also discuss the rationale for why they crafted something a certain way.
I don't define myself as only a SWE, but that's not necessary to have appreciated that intellectual community. I hate that it's disappearing.
At the same time, other intellectual communities are also disappearing down the same vast, cannibalistic maw of AI, as people stop intentionally crafting strategies, software, music, and images for themselves.
So my own answer to this would be that these communities evolved out of necessity, not because someone needed to make new friends. Join a book club, etc. just sounds like a sort of secondhand way to "find community" as if that were the original goal. There is nothing urgent about a book club, nothing that pertains to your job or your life or even your interests; it's just to make new friends and read a book. "Join a book club" is like "go to the gym". A book club is not an intellectual community in any sense resembling those which were composed of individuals creating their own things and bouncing their ideas off each other. In fact, a book club is simply a way of consuming things together.
When the creative process itself becomes pointless, all you have left are consumption-driven hobbies and clubs. It's just not the same.
Not the same as me having to tackle a really hard logic problem and asking people I respect as very smart coders for their input on how to handle it. Not the same as me spending all night for months recording an album and asking other musicians I respect for their input before I release it. Not the same as me writing a novel and giving it to other novelists before I submit it for publication.
That's what we're losing. Or, effectively, what has been stolen from us (all my code, all my novels, all my music) and re-sold by people who don't care to other people who don't care.
In an Ayn Rand sense, I'll just stop creating anything for the public, and so will everyone else who has creative ideas. The world can drown in a cesspool of regenerated slop that they stole from the people who had ideas; it's all a tower of babylon, owned by a few companies now, so you won't get very far in making any slop apps/music/writing profitable. There's no barrier to entry involving the brain now, just how much money you have (and no one will make any more money now who doesn't already have it; there will be no further upward mobility from education or effort).
No, just go join a gym, and run on a treadmill. Your input in the shape of the world is no longer needed. That's the general idea.
Thanks, I am not a musician so I found your comparison to it very interesting. I otherwise agree with everything you've said and I think the creative aspect is something that is absent from my alternate communities
What's interesting to me is that some of these communities are remaining strong despite the AI tidal wave. Although it might be my bubble. For instance, there is still a thriving art scene on instagram which has successfully demarcated itself from AI art. There is also a writing community on substack. Are there hobbyist programming communities out there that can keep the practice of human coding alive?
currently in my experience, no, there's a total collapse on the front of people making code by hand for the sake of art. In the past six months, I've begun to suspect that I might soon be the last person on the planet doing it without any AI assistance in my job. It's been a brutally fast change.
Maybe it's that to some people, earning something or creating something is more satisfying than stealing it, while to many other people it doesn't matter where it comes from. This is true in all walks of life. I never cheated on a test, but plenty of kids I knew did. Those people have no problem taking shortcuts because they don't understand the satisfaction of doing something right.
When a whole civilization falls victim to that mentality, we end up with zero responsibility and intellectual collapse.
No, the alphabet was secret knowledge belonging only to the initiated priest class before people stole it and divulged it to the public. Now you owe their descendants royalties for a lifetime use of the alphabet, unless you're a thief.
The issue may be simpler than that. The technical cohort that's on the chopping block of automation right now uses seemingly sophisticated words to basically describe what the coal miners and human calculators felt in the past. When you compound this with the general struggle on the social skills dimension that defines the majority of this group, you can see why the idea of stepping out of their respective narrow field and getting a hobby would seem ludicrous.
There's always some anxiety around job security, that's nothing new. I've been around enough rounds of that to know it well. This isn't that.
We're talking about a fundamental disruption of knowledge work, to know that you might not even be able to pivot to something else. It's kind of like when people would callously tell the coal miners to "learn to code", except it's now "learn to be an electrician".
But I don't feel you're really acting in good faith here, with your negative stereotypes and derisive language.
So: the anxiety is real and not new, but this phase of automation is really unique and different, because of "fundamental" "disruption" of "knowledge work". Consider me convinced, since this line of reasoning is original and not accounted for in the comment you're replying to.
Yea it’s probably deep seated horror at slowly being replaced. I’m not sure what I feel but ordering a clanker around everyday is exhausting both emotionally and intellectually. I would rather not even talk to the thing, but they fucking suck at software architecture no matter what anyone says. You can’t just leave them alone with a task because you get the worst designs 7/10 times. The other 3/10 scare me enough that I’ve started learning how to install solar and battery systems online.
I should probably read something about past instances of this; you mentioned coal miners and maybe hearing their stories will help us.
> I should probably read something about past instances of this; you mentioned coal miners and maybe hearing their stories will help us.
IMO it probably won't make you feel any better, for the following reasons:
1) The AI disruption is going to be far wider than any previous disruption, people will have much less chance to pivot to something else while continuing to do economically productive work, because not just one field is in danger, every field based on cognitive work is in danger (and all the manual labor isn't too far behind with robotics advances).
2) Even despite the more limited blast radius of prior work disruptions, they were still generally awful for the people who got disrupted. People love to cheerily talk about how the industrial revolution lead to a world of more, different, better, safer jobs and while that did happen, the newer world wasn't really for the people who were displaced, but rather people of the next generations. The people who were actively displaced were mostly hard fucked... economically destitute and emotionally damaged from loss of purpose.
Nah, my wife is from an old coal mining family; her and her family are VASTLY better off than their immediate ancestors. I’d also suspect if said ancestors were alive now, they’d be happy to know that their descendants live in vastly better and safer world
IMO none of this is at odds with what I said. The test would be the ability to interview the ancestors in the past, near the end of their life, after they had lost their jobs. How happy were they then?
And in any case, should we move into a world with real ASI the outcome is going to be very different than the displacement of a single industry.
If an ASI replaces you at one cognitive job, it replaces you at all of them certainly faster than you can reasonably retrain.
> Sure, there's the obvious "I enjoy the mechanics of programming" component that's gone but then there's also this general feeling that is hard to shake which feels a little deeper. I've wondered about it. Is it all the layoffs? The suddenly shaky economics for a lot of our companies? The uncertainty of the career's future in general?
Internet town squares have polarized. Not just by capital P politics, but just according to the poles that inhabit them. The highly energized maximalists and doomers spend all of their time posting online about it, not really caring about whether the community or even reality conforms with their thoughts. The rest of us roll our eyes and leave the town squares. We laugh at them in our group chats, sneer at them at our parties, but we don't talk in the town squares about the absurdity anymore.
I don't really know what to do about this. When the SaaS boom was happening in the late 2000s/early 2010s, there was a tranche of cautiously optimistic and cautiously pessimistic bloggers, along with the highly motivated zealots. The middle is hollowed out now.
I really liked this. I've felt the exact thing the author is describing - I used to care a lot about my craft (iOS apps), and that has been blown apart by AI. Not that craft and taste isn't still a differentiator - I think it's just so much less satisfying to create something perfect over weeks, if you can get 80% of the way in an afternoon.
"Private intellectual activity that is sustained, complex, and long-term requires an external intellectual community to provide material and motivation, like fuel and oxidizer. That private activity, in turn, sustains the community..."
I think a lot of the greatest art has been produced by this kind of "scene". Music for example isn't created only by an individual, it comes from listening and watching and playing with others. Later, you sit down and all of that input turns into something brand new.
I think at the same time I started getting "out of coding", I started getting deeper into music. And if it was just me, that would've been a short lived thing. But having people in real life to play with and bounce off makes it about 100x better and keeps you going long after you would've fallen off on your own.
I'd encourage anyone who feels this way to find something similar. The act of creation is still as essential as before, you just need to direct your energy toward something more purely human. Get into writing, drawing, woodworking... even as these things are instantly mass-producible, we'll still value and pay for humans to do them.
I've been overhauling my parent's backyard. Mostly it's cleaning up decade's worth of clutter. From there there's regenerative visions for mulch, native plants, and intentional areas for life humans and critters alike. I'm learning a ton. What a great displacement for my creative energy with the added benefit of being physically demanding.
I'd add to your comment that AI is the thousand-ton cherry on top of the perfect storm. Covid destroyed our professional communities. Work doesn't and won't look like how it was pre-2020. AI just makes everything super weirder. It's hard, as a human, to cope.
This was my initial reaction as well. I have been thoroughly invested in the craft of software engineering for 3+ decades. From the blog posts mentioned in the all the way back to Byte magazine at the library as a 10 year old. But those days appear to be perhaps behind us now, as suggested in the article. I am grieving it, despite the fact I have embraced LLMs for creating software.
But I refuse to use LLMs for things like making music. I like your term "purely human". There's no place for fancy statistical engines in human art. Art belongs to human communities and human culture. Which is where, apparently, I will continue to find my refuge if not my living.
I am quite pro AI for various reasons, but for this reason I just don't see low effort AI art really taking off beyond memes, corporate promotional material, and porn. The value of art is the humanity behind it. It's the reason abstract modern painting continues to be valued despite many folks finding its absolute skill level to be lower than, say, the impressionists or modernists of yore.
Yeah, I'm thinking of the one time I was in a band where we gelled musically, and I noticed I started writing more/better music subconsciously. And a particular type of music that would fit with the band.
I think it's not always a voluntary response. If you're involved in some kind of social situation, your mind automatically points a certain way.
If you lack an enriching situation, then your mind might just get lost !
Yes. I've told a few friends and acquaintances that somehow AI is the least interesting technology in my lifetime - the boosters use AI to write about how they used AI to build new tools to help them AI their AI, the haters write (or sometimes, shockingly, use AI to write) about how AI will AI all of us. Have you tried this new skill? Read my research paper, it shows that AI can do good work unsupervised? Oh, yeah, that's interesting, what do you think about how it did X, Y, and Z? I dunno man, I didn't spend that much time on it.
It's getting lonely out there, even if or especially if you've converged on "I don't care much about AI".
If it had no other function than a better than Google search engine that is able to teach me topics I'm interested in at exactly my speed it would be the most interesting technology to come along in a while. The fact that it does all the other stuff it's doing is hard to even come to grips with in the time it's been around.
I mostly learn about my passions / hobbies so interesting conversations w/ others that share them come up pretty much daily. That said I find there's a group of people who will shun me like I kicked their dog for having any interest in using AI, which I find unfortunate.
Yes. I find it unexciting in quite a surprising way, and yet I resent how much of my brain it is taking up.
It should be incredibly exciting. I try to find the interesting parts that I can relate to, build on, survive with. But instead it feels like an ominous, featureless thief-of-joy grey goo coming for everything.
I think this feeling crystallised when I saw someone had used it to rebuild Prince of Persia and my immediate gut reaction was quite clear: I wanted to scream “could you please just fucking leave one good thing unsullied!?”
> even if or especially if you've converged on "I don't care much about AI"
I don't care much about AI but hot damn it makes working on the things I do care about easier.
We use it a lot at work (soft eng) and my job has slowly morphed into "Okay how do we continue shipping sane software when we effectively 10x'd our org size in six months as agents became reliable?". That has been pretty fun. I care about creating good software.
And I care about budgeting and finance projections for home finances, especially as a new baby entered the room. But I am very bad at spreadsheet fiddling. AI has been super helpful in doing the fiddling so I can focus on the thinking.
edit to add another example: I really care about managing my team and keeping us effective, but I hate playing ticket monkey. Offloading basic ticket management (agent, make me a ticket; take this thread and create 3 tickets; respond back when tickets are done; etc) to an agent has been great
That’s great! I unironically hope you find those things interesting and AI has opened them up for you. I’m not trying to be snarky, but - along the lines of my attempted point upthread - has any of that led to an interesting conversation? An exchange of information with other humans? Or at least taken something dull out of the way so the actual interesting conversation can take place?
> has any of that led to an interesting conversation? An exchange of information with other humans? Or at least taken something dull out of the way so the actual interesting conversation can take place?
Yes! Lots.
It’s kinda similar to the concept that money doesn’t buy happiness, it buys time to do the things and see people who make you happy. Offloading drudgery to computers buys time to do the human stuff
For example: you can have a much more invigorating discussion with a coworker if every iteration takes 2 minutes instead of 2 hours. Moves from an async “let’s schedule a followup” to a lively real time collaboration
Or the budgets example, we could have a conversation about values and priorities because chatgpt made me a UI that let us drag sliders around and see the impact of our decisions in real-time.
It seems we (now more than ever) have to fight for fun, fight for a shared meaningful reality. Arriving again at the idea that enlightenment is a group activity.
I did my Masters in ML and a decade ago it seemed AI was so exciting. You could build relatively good models at home. Our university had a cluster that could train SOTA models. It seemed like every year we were discovering a breakthrough new neural net structure.
Nowadays all the development is done at a bigtech lab, and you aren't going to be able to tell anyone about it. Everyone else is relegated to interacting with slightly larger and larger LLMs over an API. On one hand it's cool that the tech is now far more accessible and impactful, but on the other AI has become immensely boring.
It's a little uncharitable take as I know some people are doing some cool innovative stuff still, and not every tech needs to be new forever anyway. I would feel less strongly if it wasn't impossible to not keep hearing about it :)
I mean, to me, this is very similar to how it was when "the web" came into its current pervasive form. You could write exactly this comment about how people were writing about how they liked the web, on the web, and also about how they didn't like it, maybe shockingly, also on the web, etc. etc.
To me, this is just how it is when a new paradigm hits the scene. Whether it's good or bad, whether you care for it or not, it is pervasive.
The web was a shared experience, by its very nature. The interconnection was the point. LLMs allow anyone to put themselves in a one-man bubble of their own creation. In a way, it is the antithesis of the internet - if the web is a global public square, the API is a digital cloister.
Pretty much by definition, a new paradigm will be very different from the previously new paradigm.
Personally, I don't think the interconnected "social" nature of the web turned out very well. Maybe (probably) the "one-man bubble" nature of AI also won't turn out well. But I'm skeptical of holding up the web's social nature as a positive. I think it turned out pretty bad. (I shared everyone's optimism in the late 90s and early 2000s and I used to just be mad at Facebook / Zuckerberg for screwing it up, but I dunno, maybe it was always going to end up this way.)
But you could still focus on backend stuff and desktop or CLI programs, think and discuss about programming languages and software engineering on the code level in all the non-web related ways with a large community. You could opt-out of most of the web-related things (which is what I did) and still have a wide community to interact with. Whereas AI appears to be dissolving almost all that community. I hope that will turn out to be a false appearance, but the thesis is that it won’t.
Ok but I think this is just a kind of myopic view that is specifically focused on the things you were / are interested in. AI is a different paradigm that is changing things for a different contingent of people.
To try to demonstrate my point with an example: If you were a journalist, the web changed literally everything in a way that was inescapable. As a software engineer, it changed a lot for a lot of people but it was not inescapable. The situation with AI is, so far, the reverse. Journalists have mostly (and correctly IMO) concluded that this isn't actually that useful to their writing, and it hasn't changed their distribution channels in the way the web did. But for software engineers, it's changing things dramatically.
I guess my perspective is just that new paradigms are not uniformly disruptive.
The article is about how AI affects intellectual communities. In my comment above I was focusing on the software engineering community that the first part of the article was discussing, and which I mistakenly took your comment to be referring to.
It’s probably right that when looking at the total of all intellectual communities, the difference in influence of the web versus AI is more nuanced. Nevertheless, I can see AI being more disruptive there overall in the way the article describes. Though I hope that this will turn out to not be the case.
No I don't think you misunderstood, I do think I broadened my take between my comment and my reply to you. I don't mean to imply that I think I have this all figured out or anything, I'm still playing with these ideas in my own mind and trying to figure out what I think.
But I do think that my general sense is that it is both similar in scale to the disruption of the web, and also very different in ways that are hard to suss out at this point.
There's several things I disagree with in this post (a matter of perspective, I think):
> The discourse around software engineering has gotten dumber. It’s like everyone in the industry lost 30 IQ points. People used to talk about compilers, type systems, logic. Now they talk about “prompts”, “harnesses”, “loops”. The discourse is narrower, shallower, and more repetitive. There’s only so many times I can hear about “agentic harnesses” before I lose my mind.
I agree with the frustration here :)
> You design a revolutionary new programming language: who cares? Maybe Claude cares, for what that’s worth. But humans don’t write or even read the code anymore. The programming language is an implementation detail the humans no longer have to care about.
Perhaps the people who weren't inclined to think about compilers, type systems, and logic before coding agents will never think about those things. If anything, I think about those systems significantly more now, because I view them as ways to describe the search space for the agent ... and perhaps, in the future, even tools to structure agentic latent representations.
So I propose rotating your viewport: yes, perhaps entertain the idea that it doesn't make sense to think about these things for human consumption ... but instead, what if we think of programming language and compiler design as being a tool to control the search space, and suddenly there's lots of new ways to think about these things.
Is this a valuable way to think? I'm not sure, but we should try and find out.
I agree with you and disagree with the OP in similar ways.
I work on my own "agentically-engineered" projects and the pursuit of certain ideas for what you're calling intrinsic motivation, and I don't particularly care if others find it interesting or even find it at all or not, because the ideas themselves are cool to me.
It's kind of like I can suddenly tinker at 2,000% efficiency and share what I'm doing, _and if someone else finds it interesting, that's cool too_
Isn’t the point you’re making what OP is saying - that there are of course some humans who have deep intrinsic motivation, and they’ll continue to do what they do, but most humans aren’t wired this way, and for that, society will collapse?
I wrote a blog post making some very similar arguments earlier this week in response to some mathematicians’ takes—just before the OpenAI paper drop a few days ago (https://creating.software/essays/ai-and-math/).
I feel we’re all realizing, at the same time, that (1) intellectual activity is communal, and yet (2) those communities are sustained by recognition of individual achievement. What a way to find this out.
I claim (here and in my post) that humanity actually can’t advance without these human communities. It’s critical that people not give up learning things that AI knows better than they do, because they play an important role in these communities, and the community is critical.
My (maybe naive) hope is still that people find ways to keep doing this stuff for fun, like chess (competitions, awards, coaches, I don’t know). We still have chess competitions and the like, even though computers are far better at chess and have been for a while. The community and the recognition of individual achievement are both there. And human chess and chess engines have gotten vastly better, so computer dominance failed to kill progress in chess (today’s stockfish would’ve beaten Kasparov in 1997 running on a desktop from 1994: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4MLBK7iCW3vYd93Mn/a-closer-l...)
Maybe math olympiads and programming contests live on well past the end of their practical utility—I always liked them.
The author brings up several examples along the lines of: 'why write a blog post about how something was built' or 'why bother making a technical note public', or 'why bother writing a new language', etc, since the LLMs will just ingest it and never credit you and no one will know.
What this really points to is a new ecosystem which is now built on theft.
I agree, the depression is real, and it has destroyed the community of code as well as the individual spirit of wanting to do, well, anything. What's the point of building anything? Anyone could prompt an AI to get some result, there is no real intelligence necessary. But what has led to this situation? Theft. The plundering of all our collective work and all the intellectual effort that was put into it.
This became really clear to me today while I was playing around with the new Illustrator/Photoshop AI-coded ripoffs of the Adobe suite. (Excuse me, VectorCraft is an "open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Illustrator, rebuilt in pure Rust" per their Github).
I may loathe Adobe and wish I didn't have to pay them another dime. But there is a fundamental difference between a group of people sitting down to build a replacement for Illustrator (like e.g. Affinity), and someone prompting an AI to just rewrite Illustrator from scratch. The AI is laundering other people's work. The AI contains a compressed version of billions of lines of code, and from that it is unpacking essentially a pirated Frankenstein binary, washed of attribution. It may have no lines of code in common with Illustrator, but everything it has was taken from code that someone wrote.
Imagine someone writes a book and you want to distribute it for free. If you reconstruct the book by taking random words clipped out of newspapers and pasted together, that's still a copy of the book.
The question is, what's anyone's motivation to write anything anymore? Who's going to write a new, better language? But we would not be in this situation except for the grand theft which allowed the creation of LLMs in the first place.
I didn't buy into the "copying unauthorized zeros and ones is theft" narrative (because it's not even an argument) when old music industry executives were screaming about Napster, and I'm certainly not gonna start now.
There's absolutely a moral debate to be had in this topic, but if your starting position is redefining common language and twist the meaning of words beyond reason, then you've already shut it down before it's even started.
I don't think it's twisting common language, but let me clarify: Tensors are a form of compression. If I take a song that a musician put out for free, convert it to a different file format and sell it (that's the key here, the commercial use), that's theft. It was theft when it was Napster, too, but even then there's a big difference between freely distributing pirated stuff and selling it.
The LLMs hoovered up everything, compressed it, and put it up for sale as bootleg IP. That's especially offensive since so much of what they took was already freely available with attribution.
A data structure which encodes a bunch of square vectors as input, stores them in a multi-gigabyte file, and uses weights across layers of them to generate an output is no different from any simple compression algorithm or a bunch of convolution kernels.
I think your issue is believing that Imaginary Property rights exist at all (especially since you’re basically advocating for software patents with this: “ It may have no lines of code in common with Illustrator, but everything it has was taken from code that someone wrote.”). Heck, how is a human supposed to learn in your view then?
Why is the argument "well it's fine when a human does it". It's not a human, or a living being, or even concious. It's software operating in our social plane (language) owned by a bunch of yahoos in the bay. They are lining their pockets reselling ideas from books they burned..not sure they should be given the same grace a lone individual reading Adobe's source code line by line.
It’s technology built, funded, and used by humans, so of course it’s fine to me. The rest just reads as a the usual political rant against the rich, which I simply couldn’t care less about if I tried.
Wait. If I build and fund a video streaming site that captures Netflix shows and lets everyone watch them for free, that's illegal and I'll go to jail. But if someone with a trillion dollars scrapes my code and incorporates it into a product they're selling access to, that's fine?
If they get no attribution and have no financial incentive, why should a person create anything? You can wish for a world without property rights, but we live in a world where there are property rights. The question therefore isn't whether the vacuuming of license-based IP violates your personal belief system or not, it's whether laws were broken or not.
This leaves us in a situation where some people can break laws and become enormously, almost infinitely wealthy, whereas other people cannot. And that is intolerable.
For example: I was a taxi driver in 2001 and I had a great idea. What if I started a company that gave people rides for money, with an SMS-based "app" that worked on a flip phone? I started coding it. The only trouble was, that would have been completely illegal. But when someone showed up with a bunch of VC and started doing it, regardless of the law, suddenly we entered a two-tiered world where I (as a cab driver) had to pay to be licensed and undergo inspections and be patrolled by a special taxi police force, whereas they didn't. And I couldn't change my prices to compete.
Now we've gone another level. Imagine I tell Claude to code me a backend and app that's a clone of Uber, and I distribute it to all the Uber drivers. Do you think, for one second, that I would be allowed to operate that business in the wild-west fashion that Uber operated when they started up? Or Airbnb?
Whether you like property rights or not, laws were broken in the training of LLMs, and the net result is a much less level playing field in which the property rights have now essentially all been coalesced into closed models which you have to pay to query. What was once created freely is now owned by Anthropic in the form of Claude, and charged for.
My contention is that this is a much more unequal situation than one in which every author owns, for a time, the right to profit from their own work or to gain recognition by attribution.
Isn't the fact that "anybody" can sit down and write a clone of Illustrator without years of work incredibly liberating?
If the tradeoff is giving up attribution, then is that worth giving this power to other people? This has and will made things that were previously impossible possible.
I think theft is a pretty strong term since what's been "stolen" is now freely available to everyone. People will have to find newer forms of motivation.
None of this work was previously found or accessible by people unless it found the right venues. For example, many people have written languages, only a few have gotten lucky enough to get on HN and get people even paying attention to them. In this new world, it's really not any different. If you find the right venues, people will know what you've created, if you don't as before, nobody will care or know.
>> what's been "stolen" is now freely available to everyone
Let me double check the cost of the API tokens I've spent on closed models this month.
Nope, not freely available.
FWIW, I think you'd have a much better information-wants-to-be-free argument if all the models were open-weight. It would still be theft, but not theft for profit, and there's a major difference between those things.
If you agree that LLM-produced code in this instance may have no LoCs in common with the source program, in what sense is this different to the replacement being written by humans? Humans also learn to write code by reading it and synthesising that reading to produce new code.
I agree that the motivation for such a consortium being formed is lower when LLMs can vomit out any program of which one can conceive, and I agree that the value in publishing is lower for no-one reading it/attributing it. But I think the functional replacement of a tool which is run in a way that is extortionate or exploitative is an objectively good outcome regardless of whether the replacing tool was small-batch bespoke artisanal Rust or synthetic Rust extruded from the bilgepipe.
Supposing there were a person or team who could rewrite Illustrator from scratch, it's still different from an AI rewriting it in a couple of ways.
Fundamentally, the people who are writing it are not property, they aren't an algorithm that has ingested other code and rearranged it. Therefore they are not simply a copying / pirating mechanism which can launder a pile of stolen code into a clean new application. At best they're either creative or they're pirates themselves.
When I write code, even if I want it to resemble something else and even if I resort to StackOverflow for help, I'm essentially writing. Nothing of that sort happens in the mechanical guts of an LLM.
What this really points to is a new ecosystem which is now built on theft.
Only if you redefine "theft" to mean learning from copyrighted material, which is more expansive than anything the RIAA or other copyright cartels have ever argued.
it has destroyed the community of code
Speak for yourself. I'm in a Discord where a bunch of people are working with AIs and each other to get Linux running on Apple Silicon Macs, and it's great to see the rapid progress.
It may have no lines of code in common with Illustrator, but everything it has was taken from code that someone wrote.
I have shocking news about where the code that you write comes from.
If you reconstruct the book by taking random words clipped out of newspapers and pasted together
Sure, which is irrelevant because that's not what LLMs do. ("What about this study that found that you can get them to recite paragraphs from Harry Potter?" Well, I can recite large portions of the Ghostbusters screenplay and my brain is not illegal).
The question is, what's anyone's motivation to write anything anymore?
I wanted a thing, so I built it, and made it available in case other people want it too. AI doesn't affect this other than making it possible to build things faster.
This is equivalent to, "I wanted to get a job, so I lied on my resume."
Also, there's a vast difference between you seeing something and copying the idea, and the world's largest companies taking everyone's ideas and reselling them, or laundering their piracy for profit.
Indeed in a weird way, one can also argue that this state is the ultimate copyleft.
If anybody can create any software anytime, everybody gets a lot of the Four Freedoms of Free Software (change it to make it do what you wish, distribute your modified version, etc), without even "having the source".
And all the programmers constantly feeding their new code into training is the contorted version of GPL'ing it.
This is my belief. As I’ve said before, RMS would never need to write a printer driver if an agent could just RE it and write a replacement. Hell, I’ve now done that myself for a device that only had an old binary-only Linux driver.
That concept only works if it's actually free. It's not free, it's just under new ownership now that it's been heisted.
And the bigger problem is that no one's actually going to make anything new that these systems can ingest. So we enter a cycle of LLMs feeding off LLM output, and a parallel decline in human cognition and creation. All for the profit of a few people. Not at all for the liberation of information.
I am feeling pretty liberated with my local Qwen, it can make copies of software, reverse engineer hardware bootloaders in a harness so I can get rid of ads and bloatware, all offline and at the price of electricity and my compute.
LLMs actually _improved_ this for me, because they can be the sparring partner and the endless lexicon of interconnected thoughts, most other humans simply lack the ability to.
They do have their limits too, but I'd genuinely, objectively say that for me and how my brain is wired, they've given me the "community" context that the world could not really provide.
I do feel like I'm approaching the limits of what they can do there though.
It's worse as soon as the things see the prompts of most public-facing harnesses, but even without that, they can only do so much.
Real humans would have a better intellectual community to offer, but for that, you actually need to find them first and hope that your schedules and energy budgets both align.
___
I think as much as we're seeing consequences of AI there, we're even more seeing the consequences of how society itself has been strip mined by big corps and big tech.
Human connection is dead not because of AI but because of Social Media.
Motivation is dead not because of AI or weakness but because spaces and contexts that would foster that have been replaced with corporate-approved standardized gray.
Globalization plays a role here. Atomization. Urbanization.
The expectation to hop around the nation for your job, nuking any ability at building a local community.
Context collapse glueing massive amounts over overhead on every single communication transmission.
You do realize Americans are /less/ likely to move now than 100 years ago? And how is urbanization, which allows more human interaction, not less, a problem? (Not very many hackerspaces, art studios, research libraries, comic cons, symphonies, etc etc in rural areas).
Just throwing more people into the same small space doesn't necessarily mean that they suddenly start interacting with each other more.
In fact, the opposite can happen, where investment into local social community building stalls completely, because why even bother?
Why would you listen to ramblings you do not really care about when there is an infinite supply of new people that don't in this very moment?
That's one mechanism. There are many more.
Urbanization is good on paper, but has many shortcomings. Hypothetically, it should be the most efficient and best solution. That hypothetical just leaves out how humans actually work.
"Private intellectual activity that is sustained, complex, and long-term requires an external intellectual community to provide material and motivation, like fuel and oxidizer."
Aside from programming, one of my main interests is reading and writing. I think that literary fiction proves what the author is saying above. Even the most reclusive, private authors (Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, etc.) actually published their work. They contributed to the community and took part as readers. Literature is always in conversation with itself. And although literary fiction may seem not to have the sway it once did in society, it is flourishing among the people who care about it (like me).
My thoughts aren't fully formed, but I find it interesting to situate technical pursuits like software engineering with humanities. And anyway, I've always felt that programming is both a science and art.
Indeed there are people who don't contribute to the community. Or maybe they can't find a publisher. I'm sure there are brilliant things written which will never find an audience.
But the broader point, in agreement with the article, is that the existence of fiction depends in part on extrinsic motivation (e.g. publishing, finding readers) and a community of intellectuals engaging with one another through their work. If everyone decided to stop seeking readers all of a sudden, the field would die and become a museum (mausoleum?) of former thinkers.
Yes, but much of it wasn’t, which was my point, as it’s simply the first case that comes to mind where we know an author demanded their unpublished work be destroyed (Terry Pratchett is another). And Kafka didn’t receive widespread recognition until after his death, when Brod started publishing his writings en masse.
Hm, but I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you saying that Kafka is a counterexample to the need for external motivation? It's true that some of his best-known work was only published only after his death (which was against his wishes, though Brod had supposedly told him that he would not destroy his works). But he did still have external motivation, e.g. Brod encouraged him, and Kafka read aloud some of his work to his friends. Also, we should be careful about interpreting his wish to destroy his unpublished works in a certain way; much of it was unfinished, and he was kind of a perfectionist.
Beautiful article. I am here to pick a nit and restate something that I've blabbed about here and elsewhere a few times before.
> Prompting is not a skill, at least, it’s a much shallower skill than software engineering. The instrumental dimension of the work has improved in that people can get more output per unit of effort, but the dimension of work that’s about building up human capital has collapsed.
I think that this is incorrect in a specific literal sense, but not in any way that changes the broader effect.
I think that "prompting" is in fact a deep skill, but not one that practically anyone has cultivated to any reasonable degree, for the simple reason that the tools change faster than anyone grip can acclimate to them.
Nobody on earth mastered the effective co-working with Sonnet 3.5. That model was a lightswitch moment for me personally. I built an agentic harness for it to convert a medium-large vue-class-component framework into vue-3's composition API, rescuing a personal project from certain doom of software rot.
I can say that I got a lot out of that model and that my own usage was (if I can say so) ahead of the curve. But with hindsight, I know that I barely scratched the surface of what it was capable of. Have I continued to hone my Sonnet 3.5 harness? Of course not. I have started over (or at least reset many assumptions) a dozen times since then. Even if I were so inclined - in the way that I am inclined to learn Chopin's Nocturnes - the model is now unavailable.
The ship has sailed.
So to the OP's point - it's not so much that skilled usage has disappeared, but that skills are self-obsoleting faster than any real degree of mastery can set in. And as an immediate consequence, the churn is too quick for anything resembling a relationship of apprenticeship. This is effectively a cultural singularity where, yes, we are each of us drifting much more alone.
Great point, whole harnesses and concepts like "loops" are obsolete in a matter of months. I think it was just 6 months ago that the GPT-5.x models needed a harness with an edit tool that took arguments in the form of a diff, otherwise the model would have trouble editing any files. Flash forward to 3 months ago and the Claude models now skip the edit tool and use the bash tool with some `sed` command 90% of the time.
It's sort of like a "bitter lesson" for all of software. Attempting to polish our tools isn't very useful when the tools are themselves these fluid minds that get general upgrades every month, and now every couple weeks.
It's a fantasy but I wonder if you were to wave a magic wand and pause model releases for 10 years if some of these areas would develop their own depth.
This really speaks to me, and Terence Tao literally wrote something very similar few days ago [1] where he advocates for a more holistic approach to intellectual fields, and the value of community building.
On a personal level I had so many to-dos, like learning Rust "properly", but I feel incredibly demotivated now, because I can just get Opus or Sol to do it. But maybe I just need to block out one day a week to be my "no AI day", and just do it.
Amazing read. AI indeed completely annihilated every other topic. You can go to any tech conference these days and anything that isn't related to AI just feels so irrelevant. It wasn't like this at all for crypto, NFT or any other hype topic of the day.
I would wager that people who do mathematics for a hobby are not at all concerned about AI.
I'm a technical guy (physics background) who has let his math skills get mildly rusty (SW for a living). In the rare moments that I have time, I try to solve some math problems. That an LLM can solve them doesn't bother me in the least. The joy is not in the result, but in using one's brain to solve a "puzzle". I actually enjoy comparing my answer with the LLM's.
That a program could easily solve a crossword puzzle doesn't make them less fun.
That Deep Blue could beat anyone at chess didn't stop people from playing it. Ditto Go.
My friend (an actual math professor) still likes solving math puzzles and discussing them with me. So I'm not an island. I think the island issue is for people who like to discuss these things with strangers online. There will always be the annoying guy who'll use the LLM and "poison" the conversation. But if you have a community of people you know in person, it's less of a problem.
Math academics: Sure, I can see the worry. Hobbyists? Not really.
Software is a bit different, and always has been dichotomous. Some enjoy for the pleasure of brainstorming a solution, as well as exploring different modes of thinking, along with enjoying the elegance of their setups (be it algorithmic or build scripts or unit tests). Others enjoy programming for what it can do for them (the "result"). Of course, the intersection of the two sets is nonempty. For SW, I think the angst comes mostly from the first crowd.
I too am in the intersection, and it does suck. But long before LLMs came around, I had a big list of things I'd like to do in my life - not just SW - and knew I didn't have time to do even 10% of them. That doing certain types of SW is not fun any more isn't a big deal. I can work on other projects.
I’ve got a physics background too and have been working in SW for 20+ years. For me the angst comes from perhaps not making a living. Do you feel certain that your ”other projects” will pay the bills, or are you fortunate enough to not have to think about that? What are the ”other projects” if I may ask?
Oh, for a living, I definitely had concerns. I suspect that much of the angst in the article was about how it affects all endeavors, including hobbies. I'm pushing back on that.
I appreciate the quick cut to calling out how disciplines suffer from lack of community - this point feels right, though calling AI out specifically falls a bit short for me. AI didn't make music clubs fail as businesses during upticks in property values in my city and it didn't move the arts scene to the outskirts when owners tried to cash in on said uptick, or kill the free print things that kept people in the actual physical local community in the loop. But yeah community sufferred.
I'm don't think I'm a booster - I'm personally struggling to keep the value of craft and taste in mind when I read such stuff; I believe those things will remain human-driven. Hopefully we can all agree there is a population out there using Claude or Chat to finish half-started or previously-aborted projects because they now have a (canned) accountability partner, projects that weren't economically feasible, where part of the prototyping thought process a funding picture and Total Addressable Market discussion. They may be super-niche and not sustainable businesses. You could even extend your community-building desires if you chose to.
Why isn't there more idea-maxxing happening, where we come together and workshop what we can actually accomplish for next to nothing timewise, but have some real positive impact? Like nurturing a community of your choice.
This is just me running an OODA loop - I see lots of crap / low-impact to humanity actions taking place. DM me for a virt coffee (see my profile) if you wanna talk some more about this 1:1.
I am super sympathetic with the bleak outlook, but it's not in my nature to stay focused there.
> Why learn to code at all? The computers can do that for us. And so the rigorous, systematic thinking you need to practice in order to be a good programmer: all gone. The machines can be rational for us. We can just vibe.
It's all fine. The world is just as good as it was before but we can do more. And Taelin's technique is pretty cool. It's just that some large amount of ideas I'd learned are now not unique and some new ideas are coming to exist.
The premise here is that, “software engineering is solved.” That is not a valid statement. There is nothing to, “solve.” Engineering is a practice; not a game or puzzle with a solution. It is a way of developing software.
I take the view that we should continue to practice software engineering. Every time you let an LLM generate some code for you is one opportunity you’ve missed to flex your muscle. If you don’t use it, you lose it. Just as you can lose vocabulary and the ability to read over time: these are not skills inherent to us! They’re learned and they must be practiced or else they will disappear.
There are ways to use these systems, if you find them ethically agreeable, in the practice of software engineering. But it cannot replace it. That part is the shared legacy inherited and preserved by each of us practicing it.
I think the author would probably agree that the profession of software engineering still has important responsibilities in the age of agents. He says so himself about his new day-to-day role:
> In my professional life, I’m happy to move one level up to become a manager of AI agents. I’m literate, I’m a good technical writer, I can describe what I want and let AI agents write the code.
Regarding continuing to practice software engineering, it is a noble ideal, but do you have an answer to the erosion of community described in the article? For instance, do you have suggestions for the author for how they might still feel motivated to invent a new programming language?
I think there are things we can do to preserve our intellectual practice, like intentionally forming communities that only do traditional coding (much like how human-only art communities still exist), but it's useful to suggest these concretely if you have any in mind.
If you want to create a programming language, create one. Do it because you enjoy it and because you have to answer a burning question. Learn how to formalize a language. Decide on whether to do that with operational or denotational semantics. Understand IR, optimization pipelines, and all that. Every moment spent on acquiring this knowledge is not lost and the time is not wasted. You’re enriched by it!
There are other people out there doing the same thing. Share with them. They’re more than happy to find like minded people.
Choosing to give up is not the answer. Claiming that engineering is, “solved,” is promoting a false narrative. It’s almost nihilist. Defeatist at least. Don’t even admit it or repeat it. It’s just not true.
All of the crypto bros told us how inevitable their technology was. We didn’t have to argue. Their constant chirping just got annoying and now look. They’re basically gone having exhausted the well.
A lot of LLM technology is in the same boat. You have a bunch of noisy people lying and hyping up the technology to line their pockets. History will sort them out too. You don’t have to give bad arguments space.
I think the worst effect AI has had on our industry is this malaise that has settled in and convinced so many people to give up, stop contributing, and accept the future that the hype bros have made up. They’re the ones getting rid of jobs, telling everyone they’re gonna get replaced, that there’s no need to learn programming or how to do software engineering.
Software engineering is going to be more important than ever. Despite the astonished claims of the intermediate beginners that Claude one-shotted the app they couldn’t be bothered to learn how to build for six years… it doesn’t magically generate good software. It can do a lot but at the end of the day it still needs a human operator to understand its output and direct the harnesses.
The thing to watch out for is people giving up on engineering as a profession. Software has barely entered that arena. But if we start vibe coding air traffic control software, it’s probably time to stop flying.
The point of software engineering hasn’t been to generate code. It’s to understand what the heck we are building. To develop the processes, techniques, wisdom, and knowledge to direct the work. To bounce between theory and application and back again. To better ourselves and make computers do useful things.
What makes you so certain that this 'way of developing software' cannot eventually be understood and practiced by AI?
I think precisely the premise of the blog post is that there will be a moment (sooner or later) where flexing that 'engineering' muscle to avoid it disappearing is irrelevant, in that this muscle will not be needed due to AI replacing it.
People can choose to stop practicing it. Like they choose to not learn cursive or shorthand and they choose to stop reading long form books and essays. If people stop practicing software engineering then yes, it will disappear.
AI won’t replace it. It’s not human. It doesn’t think, feel, reason, care about, have thoughts or visions of the future. It doesn’t wake up in the morning or dream at night. It doesn’t get inspired. It doesn’t talk with other people and collaborate and share stories with them in the evenings about the struggles they’ve had working on a hard problem.
It’s an algorithm that runs on a machine that performs query analysis and inference on a model.
It can’t tell you what you want, that your specification is wrong, that you’re better off choosing a different avenue.
It doesn’t enrich your own knowledge and practice using it.
Sure, it can be used to generate lots of code. We can tweak the harnesses and parameters to optimize it to solve many classes of problems. But what do you think engineering is?
I don’t think AI is going to replace people. People are going to choose to do that. And some of use are going to believe them. Some of us aren’t.
> It can’t tell you what you want, that your specification is wrong, that you’re better off choosing a different avenue.
I’m sorry, but I’m baffled by this? I’ve had plenty of times where I’ve had an agent check a spec or propose alternatives. And for that matter, I also read novels now on recommendation of an LLM using my existing favorite books, that’s pretty explicitly telling me what I want.
> What makes you so certain that this 'way of developing software' cannot eventually be understood and practiced by AI?
That doesn't make it solved though. I also take issue with specifically "software engineering is a solved problem". Even Boris from Anthropic said it =( I thought he'd be the one to understand more deeply.
If we translate the criticism charitably "solving" anything is pretty aggressive with regard to the long tail of nuance and care and effort and mastery and such. I think that's what we should focus on. When we proclaim that a discipline that people have spent large parts of their lives mastering is "solved" it doesnt' feel so great. That doesn't prove otherwise, but at least let's get to the root of the meaning. I don't think it's solved. If we understand that software is really about solving human problems through technology, within real-life constraints, then AI isn't very good at that. It doesn't have "taste" is the soundbite. It is the root cause of why AI slop is called AI slop.
I suspect part of the taste problem is that the average person…has no taste (which is why so much AI slop is being shared to begin with). I also see no reason to believe that this isn’t a problem to be fixed, rather than some inherit limitation of generative AI.
That's fair but maybe it's a dangling carrot. Human taste will always be just out of reach for most, robots included. Avante-garde had it right all along.
>Without community, you don’t get isolated individuals each working on their own things: you get nothing
At least in the US this is something that's been dissolving for a long time. The rugged individualist thing has been around forever but it seems to be getting stronger and stronger. The internet itself really seemed to kill a lot of local communities, which at first wasn't terrible but has web 2.0 and social media commercialized our attention the platforms were no longer about connecting. Then add in all the disruptions of bots and trolls that are faceless and unrelenting on the net it's not terribly surprising that AI invaded so easily.
I used to get calls often from my friends to ask me questions about my area of expertise. Not urgent things, just friendly "hey--what if..." kinds of questions.
Without the question, they might have never called. But because they called, we usually ended up just talking about other things too. Life. Girls. Work.
I rarely get calls like that anymore. It breaks my heart.
For the last few years, me and my friend have been working on a toy problem together. It's a problem that the most recent wave of LLMs can almost certainly solve and probably even one-shot. We now realize that no one's going to read our paper if we ever decide to publish our work. But we still use our weekly meetings to talk about things and make little progress here and there, come up with new questions, etc. It's bittersweet.
This sounds like a bummer. But honestly I can't relate to this at all. I've never gotten calls like that. It's just not what my relationships with friends and family have ever been about. (Nobody cares about my expertise, and to the extent they have, they always just wanted me to fix their virus interested windows xp machine, because that's the limit of their understanding of what "computer people" know about, and I always hated that!)
But there is an intellectual community, it’s just about those pesky prompts, loops and harnesses.
The assembly community is not thriving, and an arithmetic community is not a thing.
It’s a lacking metaphor, sure. But it points to how these processes have happened many times before.
The author disses these new concepts as “shallower”, but in reality they reality they’re just newer.
What they consider deep discussion of compilers (as if that’s a big part of software engineering and not a niche that interested 0.01% of them) is the result of decades of building the field.
Will AIs build a deeper field or act differently, I do not know. But it feels like the author is mostly discussing the current state of the world, and to me that states feels as if it’s just a repeat of history.
The end result of this is either AI annihilates human value, and we become pets or are annihilated ourselves, or AI is restricted to never pass a certain level.
How beautiful it is that the author gives a two-line summary of the post, right at the beginning:
> In this post, I argue that individual intellectual activity can only be sustained in an intellectual community of other humans. AI dissolves these communities, which in turn makes private intellectual activity rarer.
As someone who has lived in islands like Ibiza and Lanzarote, it is shocking for me the use of "an island is an isolated place" mentality.
Maybe is people used to drive for moving, not imagining anything else as a possibility. People living in islands learn to pilot a boat and boom, you can move all around the Mediterranean and even the world.
Islands in the Mediterranean were the most connected things you could get in ancient times. And islands today continue being one of the most connected things there are.
In Ibiza there was ancient contact with Romans, Greeks, Carthaginians, Arabs, vikings, and later people from Aragon, Napoli, and Turks, then the French, the British, the Germans, then the Americans. The American hippies that hid from Vietnam occupied the island, Russian oligarchs on their yachts and later the Germans.
Almost everybody there living from tourism and commerce, not specially isolated disciplines.
The Canary Islands were the essential link between America and Europe.
It is over ten times cheaper to transport anything by sea than by land. Go to Ethiopia or Central African Republic to see how not having access to sea is a dramatic thing for a country.
Very well written. I tend to forget how important the people around me are, and as you say, force myself to act with the "high status" intrinsic motivation.
Recently, I'm in a context with extremely talented people I respect and want to impress to some extent. The difference is night and day
Incredible blog post! I've been very much disagreeing with most mathematicians on this topic and also getting kind of annoyed at how ineloquent they are at getting to the point.
This on the other hand has actually kind of swayed me over? I think it's still a massive net-benefit for society but I resonated a lot with the author's feelings and I want to understand how to cope with them myself, perhaps by joining groups of people who are still interested in pure software (which AI is a part of now).
The -30IQ line in particular reminded me of DHH's ramblings on Twitter the past few days.
Privacy community will probably never stop valuing that the code is actually human-readable with human level intent, purpose, and clarity, and that someone has read it hundreds of times and written it to be read that many times. It's been extremely interesting to work with ever better models to try to have it produce code that can do that, but with the clarity demands, LLMs still struggle doing anything more than accelerating a small subtask.
On AI and communication with others: before AI when joining a company, the first weeks was all about talking to team mates asking about the systems we own as a team, how things work, how to do X, how to get unstuck…
Nowadays you ask all of that to codex/claude. And it works. It’s a regression. I don’t mind spending 2h helping a colleague debugging an issue. It’s fun, it creates bonds and we both benefit from it (ofc my employer would think it’s a waste of time, but I couldn’t care less about what executive millionaires think)
I feel like your response to AI depends in part also how much you find the status quo stimulating and interesting. If you are a social butterfly like the OP and already embedded and happy with communities, then of course AI will be a big loss in contrast. I do much agree with his assessment of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, though.
-fewer people are asking questions because they’re asking AI instead or AI obviates the question by solving the challenge immediately.
-Asking a question is less likely to get you good answers because fewer people know the answers (or give you an AI response you could’ve generated yourself)
The thesis that intellectual activity will disappear due to AI is similar to the flawed logic people use against taxing billionaires. "If you tax billionaires, then no one is going to want to work hard!"
In reality, we are programmed to compete and produce and climb the social hierarchy. Intellectual achievement and its use as a delineator in society is not going away anytime soon. Your blog post is active, living proof of this.
It's just shifting... likely to more and more things that signal "hey, this was definitely not produced by AI" such as the lack of capitalization of sentences which has caught on.
I agree that prompting is a much shallower skill than engineering, and I really hate the term “prompt engineering” since I feel it puts something that (by design) is easy to learn on the same level as something relatively hard to learn.
There is admittedly a bit of skill to use these tools, but they’re really not hard to use. For the most part Claude can decipher my typo’d-to-hell prompt and figure out what I want, and even if it gets it wrong the first time I can usually correct it. The hardest part is determining some objective test for Claude Code to test against and “anchor” it, but I still think that’s easier than writing a bunch of unit and integration tests.
I like these tools; I think Claude Code is very useful and even if I didn’t like it I would still use it because it’s clear that’s where the world is headed and I want to stay competitive.
For personal projects I actually care about, I still write code by hand. I do think I write better code than Claude but I would still do it by hand even if I didn’t, just because I realized I was losing my intuition about software because I was outsourcing to Claude for everything.
There are plenty of things that I am honestly fine losing my intuition with. I don’t really derive much enjoyment from reading dmesg logs, and I am more than happy to let a robot have its fun with that, but it can take the mathey shit from my cold dead hands now.
The skill isn't "prompting", it is figuring out what to do, validating that it works the way you want, and thinking about how to best support future iterations of things you might want to do.
Which, not coincidentally, is pretty much the same description as what the job was already about.
I know, but even given that I really don’t think it’s that hard, and certainly not as hard as regular pre-AI software engineering.
We all like to act like “the hard part was figuring out what we want”, but I don’t think I really buy that anymore. Even when I really half-ass Claude prompts, it still usually figures out what I want well enough, and when it doesn’t it usually does once I give it correction.
I think this actually gets at a big part of what is causing this existential crisis. You're right, I don't think it was ever true that "the hard part was figuring out what we want". I think there have always been two hard parts: 1. Figuring out what is useful, and 2. Implementing a useful thing well. The second of these has gotten a lot easier, which means the first has become more important. But software engineers have long had a tendency to underrate that first part and consider it easy. I have long perceived a (to me) baffling arrogance that product management is an easier and less important job than software engineering. But that was never an accurate perspective, imo. And now that the "implementing things" job has gotten easier and the "figuring out what to implement" job has become more important, people with this perspective are really being thrown for a loop.
I think there is high uncertainty of how the world will change. My personal plan has two arms.
1) Be at the top of applying AI. The frontier overestimates of how able the average person is of applying what’s possible now. I would hope that with my software I can make money for a couple of more years. I constantly test my ideas on how far I can scale them through AI and what angles could be not as easily replicated. I’m aware that the average knowledge is catching up and I’m not faster. One could argue that also the expectation of how a software works gets higher. So users have lower attention spans want customized landing pages and UX needs to be more visual intuitive. So part of the gain in downstream benefitting users.
2) You can argue very long about 1) and I have arguments for both sides. So far it works for me and the numbers are on my side, however on the other side my plan B or 2) in this case is getting ready for life outside. I’m going in front of the camera I’m improving my talking skills I’m try to learn to build things. If you want if all knowledge work is gone. It’s literally entertainment, work with your body, serving or selling. I personally like entertainment most of that.
I’ve been trying to predict and I’ve changed my mind often, so now I’m just saying I don’t really know how the world’s gonna change.
If you exclude the deep work on models themselves and just focus on use — harnesses etc. — then the intellectual community is basically prescientific. Very little meaningful empiricism. danluu's notes on benchmarks and experimental design come to mind: https://danluu.com/exercise-7/
This response confuses me, as I’m pretty sure OP is talking about AI use (i.e. applied use, from solving math problems to vibe coding to etc etc) not something like harness design or benchmarking? I’m also not sure what empiricism has to do with it, are non-scientists not intellectuals in your eyes?
Nope. There's a lot of unscientific intellectualism out there. I don't see a lot of intellectual depth in the communities springing up around AI use — I had vibecoding in particular in mind, and Fernando's blog post directly addresses mathematics.
I don't understand the contrast you're drawing. Harness design and benchmarking are major aspects of vibe coding (and solving math problems with LLMs, for that matter); I would go so far as to say harness design and benchmarking are the more intellectually serious aspects of vibecoding. Fernando is definitely aware of them as well. These just aren't meaningful substitutes for the intellectual work being diminished.
The author's contention is that the AI-in-software discourse is much less intellectual than software discourse previously was:
> The discourse around software engineering has gotten dumber. It’s like everyone in the industry lost 30 IQ points. People used to talk about compilers, type systems, logic. Now they talk about “prompts”, “harnesses”, “loops”. The discourse is narrower, shallower, and more repetitive. There’s only so many times I can hear about “agentic harnesses” before I lose my mind.
> People used to talk about compilers, type systems, logic. Now they talk about “prompts”, “harnesses”, “loops”. The discourse is narrower, shallower, and more repetitive.
I feel like you can write a parody of this for every lower->higher level language change that's happened throughout history. I know LLMs are bigger change than going from ASM->C but it rhymes, at least to me. And I've never liked C, I've used pointers a handful of times in college and then thankfully never had to think about it again. I work in higher-level languages and that's not a thing I need to concern myself with.
I'm sure that statement will encourage name calling by some people or gasps in horror by people who work in C or similar languages but I've never enjoyed them. I find technology, computers, and program languages all fascinating and enjoy learning the history of it. I enjoy things like the Crash Bandicoot blog series talking about all the tricks they had to do to get the game to run on underpowered hardware and a SDK that didn't know what it wanted to be (my own re-wording) but I don't pine to go back to those days.
I see LLMs as just a step up the stack and making it easier for more people to create. Will it create a loss of parts of the art of programming? Undoubtedly. But I imagine there is a long list of people who used to be really good at some aspect of programming that a higher-level language removed the need for, that happens. This is happening on a _much_ larger scale, no doubt but it's the same concept.
> We care, and we should care, about contributing to the world. And if technology makes our contributions superfluous, then what is left?
It's made a specific aspect of our contributions (the actual writing of the code) superfluous but it hasn't removed all the other contributions. Maybe you all are using better models than I am (doubtful, I'm using Claude too) but "Idea -> Implementation" is much faster but "Implementation -> Polished Version" still takes a human (for now), at least in my experience. The LLM still writes the code to get to a polished state but there are tons of little UI/UX things it does badly and needs my guidance on. And, more importantly, writing code was never the hardest part of my job really, it was things like taking requests from the business side and turning them working code. The LLM makes parts of that easier for sure. I love being able to brainstorm and kick ideas around so easily or knock out a POC in an afternoon. However, there is still plenty of "human work" that needs done. I'm sure this will shift further, nothing is ever "settled", but when that happens I'll be looking at the next layer of problems I can solve.
I like solving problems, and yes, the LLM has taken away a whole slew of problems that I used to have to solve myself but I still see an unending ocean of problems to address that will satisfy me the same way writing code used it.
Semi-related: I believe so many people are writing "Software Factories" because it's the "next" problem to solve. Many of us looked up one level in the stack and said, "cool, now that the code is handled, how can I automate/improve the pipelines around that". I feel like as an industry there are many of us who effectively have been working to automate our jobs further, at least as a "background process" in our day-to-day, all along. Now we have a different part of that workflow to automate.
Ive felt like most of my software career has always been focused around automating my own job away and I've always loved it.
And nothing has changed for me except my standards are higher, I have better and more thorough testing, and I can iterate and do significantly more.
Throughout my career ive actually worked from some assembly work to higher level language. PowerPC-> x86 assembly. From c++ to typescript.
And now with agentic work im still having the time of my life. It's actually resolved some of my personal focus and attention problems too.
I still push plenty of code to github and if only agents read it and it goes uncredited thats fine with me. Since its not like any of us ever really got publicly credited working at most corporations beyond an immediate team anyway. There are no credits on the big software I've contributed too.
The tools and scripts I build now have shifted to help human and agents work better together. Let agents do what they do better and help empower humans to do what they are better at still.
For the foreseeable future I am still quite optimistic and energized about continuing to do useful and productive work.
> Ive felt like most of my software career has always been focused around automating my own job away and I've always loved it.
Yep, this is pretty much exactly what I was trying to say.
And to the rest, I wholeheartedly agree. My ability to build and ship has been multiplied and continues to grow and I absolutely love it. There are growing pains and things are changing quickly but I find it exciting and energized as well.
Throughout the history of computing the number of developers has been climbing as has the demand. In that time the ability of 1 developer has increased, on average, to be able to accomplish more in the same amount of time/effort. Will the industry change? Undoubtedly, but automated out of a job? I doubt it. More companies will find it financially viable to hire a full-time developer who can do what would overwhelm a single person in the past, or hire a small team that can execute at the level of a much larger team.
I wonder if this mixes up cause and effect. I've been working on several projects with AI tools to satisfy my intellectual and aesthetic curiosity. But I'm reluctant to share them--to engage with the community--because of the toxic discourse around usage of these tools. "Sure, I could post this cute Go library I worked on with Claude to /r/golang, but people will probably just say 'AI SLOP' and downvote it."
Communities of intelligent peers seeking knowledge and discussion will always exist: this is almost axiomatic. Perhaps they will leave their slopified peers behind and mostly exist in a cloistered form. Perhaps the technology they create will even help form their cloisters: for example, esoteric programming languages that LLMs can't easily work with.
AI seems to be revealing a lot of people get into industries like software engineering or math for a base external validation of their intelligence through their pursuits. The author realizes this and kind of handwaves it away in the last paragraph with some spurious generalizations. If you're not someone who organizes their self-esteem around being "intellectually necessary", this and all the handwringing reads as nonsense. AI hasn't taken away understanding for its own sake, local usefulness, arbitrating taste, or pure play. It's not an existential threat to the human need for community - only to the temperaments of a certain, vocal, subset who will need to evolve.
Good takes but you say that like it's NBD. Western civilization most definitely derives meaning and purpose from work. That in itself is a problem yes. But feel like you're shrugging and saying "told you so". Probably not so helpful.
Maybe it is NBD - the concept of deriving your meaning and purpose from "what you do" instead of "who you are" has always seemed vulgar, so in some ways this turning is simply a necessary comeuppance for that status-seeking mentality. If these folks can muster some of their newly idle individual intellectual activity towards unbinding their self-worth from public recognition, they'll be alright!
>Maybe it is NBD - the concept of deriving your meaning and purpose from "what you do" instead of "who you are"
I spend 40 hours a week at my job. I have spent thousands of hours learning about programming, software engineering, and the domain knowledge for the niche that I work in.
In this time I have surely spent more of my waking time within the confines of an office building than I have with my wife and family.
You'll need to forgive me then if I let such a large part of my life bleed over into my identity.
he states is that no man is an island, but then states that "individual intellectual activity can only be sustained in an intellectual community of other humans", which I read as bieng "no man is an island, but all 'succesfull' men are islanders"
which is true up to a point, as there are men who are reasonably comfortable with bieng adrift, or setting anchor or sail, as there mood or the weather requires.
Value of contributing/sharing small tools (< 5-10 thousands lines), that can be written by a LLM in an hour or two is perhaps too little to bother.
But it's still possible and useful to contribute (or to contribute to) complex well tested programs, that are just not reproducible in a weekend by a LLM.
Also organizing projects maybe in a form that makes them easy to reliably customize and extend by a LLM, if that's how the people will interact with open SW development in the future, may also be something useful.
Though I dunno what "complex" will mean in the future, if LLM can at the moment already write state of the art well tested C23 compliant re-targetable C compiler for various 16/8-bit MCUs, along with SW simulators, along with timing exact system verilog IP cores, for 5 different architectures, in two weekends on a cheap $100/mo. plan and it all just works. :) It's going to be hard.
Yeah as someone who has been working on multiple large scale systems projects entirely with agents…there’s not much left that can’t be built given the tokens and time (and patience of course…for now).
I really don't get how you could miss this one, but I should have empathy -- he's presumably one of today's 10,000. But jeez... blaming "open source software isn't compensated" and "blogs are bad, now" on AI is just... yeah.
I find this perspective to be narrow and uncurious. AI is disrupting community -- it is not utterly dissolving it. I see no evidence of that. So many, including the OP, see AI as separator, an entombing force, somehow a black hole of intellect. In reality it is an evolution of the search engine which connects, navigates and further constructs digital civilization.
Doesn’t that always seem to be the problem with the booster rhetoric. The upside is always somewhere in the hypothetical future while the downsides are already being acutely felt.
> So many, including the OP, see AI as separator, an entombing force, somehow a black hole of intellect.
Because the ultra-rich people who are building and controlling most of it are using it to do exactly those things to society, because they aren't capable of sharing this planet with the rest of us equitably. Were it being used to empower humanity (instead of just a small handful of the worst of us), I'm pretty sure the "AI haters" would be a tiny minority at most (if they existed at all).
In that vein, "Swapping Money For Expertise" [0] suggests that there's a political/power-dynamic at play for why this particular kind of AI is so appealing to your boss' boss:
> The fact that a theory-free AI might demand far more cash to accomplish a task (even a "solved" one like playing chess) than an expert [helping with a symbolic AI] would charge is beside the point. Billionaires have money, they don't have expertise. Theory-free inference is a bid to substitute one for the other: the beauty and terror of being able to manipulate the world without studying or understanding it is that it can be done with money alone. No experts needed.
> In a world in thrall to financial power, expertise is the only substantial form of power that can reliably contest the power of wealth. [...] This is why AI bosses are so violently allergic to the idea of hybridizing [machine learning] AI with symbolic systems that operate on models of the world.
"No man is an island" is retarded. Literally retarded because nowadays we have internet and abundant information at our individual disposal. Things have changed and the failure to recognize this is retardation.
Almost nobody cares about intellectual activity. Not now, not before AI. People only care about status. That's all. The people who care about intellectual stuff are islands nowadays. They are all alone.
This is all good and full of great opinions but these are the same arguments used by artisans during the industrialization against machines. Does it matter really to hand over a large chunk of this work to AI, in the grand scheme of things? Not really. Most python apps were slop written by humans, the analogue of mass market goods. Same principle will apply here, high quality goods are still usually hand made even today. From a software standpoint, if you need something niche, max performance, max security or whatever you will probably hire the best humans instead of handing it over to Opus 7.8.
The wheels are in motion and there's pretty much nothing we can do to stop them.
Here's an analogy: People slowly developed skills on killing things; methods learned over thousands of hours and it is seen as a lifelong skill. These methods remain very useful for understanding the discipline of killing all of the various living things that need to be killed to sustain our modern world.
AI is a gun. Pulling the prompt trigger takes 99% of the effort out of the daily grind - point, shoot, reload.
Once the gun arrives, everyone that needs to kill is getting at least one gun. Use of the old knife, arrow, sword, etc. is downgraded from life skill to sport. The discipline remains intact, but just the parts needed to understand how it all is supposed to work remain useful. Nobody is getting paid to hunt with a sharp stick. Replace that stick with a rifle, and you've still got something.
This issue I have with this post is that it treats time saved with AI like a sunk cost. That isn't the case.
When AI allows you to think less about the how in software, every minute you save is a minute you can spend literally anywhere else. You aren't limited. There is no obligation to remain within the realm of software. You can use your saved time to watch a movie, read a book, or maybe dream of electric sheep. Whatever it is, there are no rules, and you get to choose.
So if you feel a loss of community from the advent of AI, you're completely free to find some other community which fulfills that same need for you. For me personally, AI has allowed me to focus much more on the design side of software, rather than the technical details. That's really meaningful for me, and it makes so that among my fellow design people, I've never had more community.
Anybody can do the same. Or maybe, you can find another outlet that suits you. The point is, you get to choose.
To put this in familiar economics terms, you can't treat your time like a sunk effort. Rather, you have to think of the opportunity cost, and ask yourself "what is the next best thing I could be doing with my time?"
> When AI allows you to think less about the how in software, every minute you save is a minute you can spend literally anywhere else. You aren't limited. There is no obligation to remain within the realm of software. You can use your saved time to watch a movie, read a book, or maybe dream of electric sheep.
Notice how you went from an intellectual, creative endeavour to a list of passive consumption behaviors. That is precisely the point the article was making. AI is killing everything that isn't just pure unthinking consumption.
Well, the post is arguing that even if you're free to find another community that fulfills an intellectual need for you, intellectual communities in general are growing weaker or being driven underground because AI is poisoning the commons and removing a source of external motivation.
For example, I enjoy blogging, and want to use the time saved from my software job to blog more. But I'm less motivated to blog these days because there's so much AI-generated slop blog content, and less readers as a result.
Part of this is because there's so much output that readers can no longer afford to spend as much attention on each piece of content. Another part is that it's harder to find fellow bloggers who truly care about the craft. When output was hard, anyone who wrote a lot clearly cared a lot. Now we have to use other signals to find kindred souls on the internet. One way is through social connections and private discords. Another way is through new technology which we can use to reclaim the commons, for example via Pangram which can demarcate what content is human-written vs. AI-written.
The whole John Donne meditation the title is referencing:
(had to memorize it in High School, and its one of my favorites. It was written over 400 years ago and has aged quite well.)Not totally related but The Tuft of Flowers by Robert Frost always reminds me Donne's poem.
I'm also reminded if "I am a rock" by Simon and Garfunkel. Last two stanzas:
https://www.google.com/search?q=simon+and+garfunkel+i+am+a+r...That's so good! Thank you for sharing it.
I really need to deep dive Simon & Garfunkel.
Thanks for sharing!
In case anyone else is wondering why the meter is so awkward: It turns out that in the original this passage was prose, not poetry. Source: https://www.universitychurch.ox.ac.uk/sermons/devotions-upon...
Hemingway also borrowed the penultimate line in For Whom The Bell Tolls. I also had to memorize this back in the day but I still stop to read it whenever I see it somewhere.
Metallica then borrowed it from Hemingway. Then there was apparently also an uplifting Bee Gees number but presumably not inspired by 'tallica.
This poem is beautifully referenced in Mark Campbell's libretto for _As One_, an opera about the life and self acceptance of a trans woman, Hannah. Her class is also assigned the poem to study. This part destroys me every time:
*Hannah before, Hannah after, Conductor, Quartet:* “…Any man’s death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind…”
*Hannah before:* I am the lone, Dissenting voice In the classroom. I rise and declare To a sea of non-islanders: “It isn’t true, I am an island.”
With all the experience Of my fourteen years, I see no other life Than one apart, Alone.
I need no one. No one needs me. I consigned myself To my own island long ago. Long ago.
I argue, and, Satisfied by My brilliant discourse on independence, Sit back down. The classroom is silent. The teacher seems impressed. (Or was she concerned?)
I'm glad you posted this, because I only knew the last two sentences, and I had completely misunderstood the meaning.
I thought it was more of a warning, like an omen. It turns out it's closer to the Tao.
This is well put and something I think a lot of us struggle with.
The internet itself seems filled with the AI maximalists who have no end of hype for the latest prompt 'technique' or AI doomers that would skin you alive if you mention you used AI to make a photo once.
Quietly among peers I talk to there seems to be a very different group that exists: those that recognize AI is super valuable for getting a lot of work done but also feel that suddenly the work is so much less exciting than it was before.
Sure, there's the obvious "I enjoy the mechanics of programming" component that's gone but then there's also this general feeling that is hard to shake which feels a little deeper. I've wondered about it. Is it all the layoffs? The suddenly shaky economics for a lot of our companies? The uncertainty of the career's future in general?
I think the author has put their thumb on it well to describe it as a lack of intellectual community. That feels like at least part of it.
> then there's also this general feeling that is hard to shake which feels a little deeper. I've wondered about it.
I had an instance of the feeling (and also what the OP is describing) when writing a post about a technical question recently.
Previously, I'd have posted the question to HN or Stack Overflow - and, in addition to hopefully getting a solution, it might also become a resource for other people who had the same question. Finally, maybe there would have been some interesting discussion around the question.
Now: Ask the AI. Instant answer, question solved, but also, nothing else.
It's very easy to just not ask the Artificial Stupidity machine.
There was also a period before google where people would discuss questions and topics. You know what most often response I got after the ubiquity of google? “Idk, google it, it’s not that hard, why are you asking me?” I just think AI is the new version of Google. At least at work, I have now started to hear more often than not “just use ChatGPT, it’ll do it for you, we don’t need to talk about it.”
I may be able to stop asking AI, doesn’t mean those around me want me to.
I think the key question we are facing is that while we cannot control those around us - who often need to adopt AI as an economic necessity - how can we ensure we are still able to find and ensure intellectual communities thrive?
I think for me I have made a conscious decision to continue writing even though lots of writers now use AI. I also find myself gravitating towards platforms like substack which already have a network of people who value human artifacts.
Well, even after Google came about, I always liked to ask people so I can have their perspective on a question, and because most of my coworkers were normal people who enjoy telling their own opinion on something (not the kind of troglodyte that would say “just use ChatGPT, ... we don’t need to talk about it”).
> I may be able to stop asking AI, doesn’t mean those around me want me to.
That's sad.
> "Is it all the layoffs? The suddenly shaky economics for a lot of our companies? The uncertainty of the career's future in general?"
I'd say that those make up the majority of it. During the dotcom bust, there were waves of bankruptcies and layoffs, tech stock valuations crashing and staying stagnant, and people struggling to find jobs for months, etc. too and there was industry-wide doom and gloom and pundits proclaiming that software was no longer worth getting into. So all this angst seems very familiar. People would probably not be as bothered about AI if the the career outlook was positive.
For the last 2 years the frontier labs have been taking on funding at valuations that can only be justified if they replace vast swathes of human labor (and they have been pretty successful so far at automating large parts of software jobs, if not the jobs themselves yet), so the career doom and gloom is justified.
Genuine and good faith question: why can't you find intellectual community anywhere else?
A bit harsh, I know, but it seems like rather a waste if we consider ourselves software people and make that our whole. If AI has replaced the need for intellectual community in software, can't we just fulfill that same need elsewhere?
Why not join a book club, or find some other outlet which serves your intellectual curiosity? May this not turn out to be an opportunity?
In my defense I didn't suggest I cannot :)
I have not been attending as many tech meetups or keeping tabs on tech news like I used to. I've been spending more direct time with friends (tech and not). I've also found enjoyment spending a lot of time in more niche internet communities that are not actually about software dev but tend to attract a lot of software dev people. I've definitely noticed I'm spending far more time on other, non-tech hobbies of mine. It has been a while since I've done any OSS stuff or organized a tech meetup.
There's the whole component of identity you mentioned. I've considered myself a 'computer guy' since elementary school and it's been a bit odd to think what I would be if not that. I'd never have even entertained that idea until recently, but in the short term I think I have developed enough of a product mindset and business skills to stay useful in tech. Maybe I need to think of myself as a 'product guy' or 'entrepreneurial guy' instead.
If AI is soon able to replace everything we bring to the table as the maximalists are claiming then honestly all knowledge work go out the window pretty quickly. If that happens then that is its own scary thought and I don't think we're really ready for that economically / socially. I pay a lot of attention to my retirement funds lately.
So frankly, I think I'm instinctively doing what you suggest... But I think it's also natural to feel some weird feelings about it all!
>Why not join a book club, or find some other outlet which serves your intellectual curiosity?
It's the stakes. Sure it was fun and intellectually satisfying, but ultimately it meant something because there was a prestige that came with cultivating a skill that brought the ultimate external validation: abnormally high pay and prestige. It was the blending of those two things that made it so special. Not a soulless pursuit of money, but also not a naive pursuit of something for passion alone. You could spend your days diving deep into something fascinating, and it was highly lucrative to do so. Now it seems we're left to choose one or the other.
Not the OP. But a few things:
Firstly, in 25 years as a SWE, and 30 years as a musician and artist, I've always found conversations about tooling to be pretty boring. I'm much more interested in conversations about intentional logic and design. As in why something was implemented the way it was implemented, as opposed to how.
Intellectual communities rely on a combination of hobbyists and professionals. They discuss their tools and their results, but they also discuss the rationale for why they crafted something a certain way.
I don't define myself as only a SWE, but that's not necessary to have appreciated that intellectual community. I hate that it's disappearing.
At the same time, other intellectual communities are also disappearing down the same vast, cannibalistic maw of AI, as people stop intentionally crafting strategies, software, music, and images for themselves.
So my own answer to this would be that these communities evolved out of necessity, not because someone needed to make new friends. Join a book club, etc. just sounds like a sort of secondhand way to "find community" as if that were the original goal. There is nothing urgent about a book club, nothing that pertains to your job or your life or even your interests; it's just to make new friends and read a book. "Join a book club" is like "go to the gym". A book club is not an intellectual community in any sense resembling those which were composed of individuals creating their own things and bouncing their ideas off each other. In fact, a book club is simply a way of consuming things together.
When the creative process itself becomes pointless, all you have left are consumption-driven hobbies and clubs. It's just not the same.
Not the same as me having to tackle a really hard logic problem and asking people I respect as very smart coders for their input on how to handle it. Not the same as me spending all night for months recording an album and asking other musicians I respect for their input before I release it. Not the same as me writing a novel and giving it to other novelists before I submit it for publication.
That's what we're losing. Or, effectively, what has been stolen from us (all my code, all my novels, all my music) and re-sold by people who don't care to other people who don't care.
In an Ayn Rand sense, I'll just stop creating anything for the public, and so will everyone else who has creative ideas. The world can drown in a cesspool of regenerated slop that they stole from the people who had ideas; it's all a tower of babylon, owned by a few companies now, so you won't get very far in making any slop apps/music/writing profitable. There's no barrier to entry involving the brain now, just how much money you have (and no one will make any more money now who doesn't already have it; there will be no further upward mobility from education or effort).
No, just go join a gym, and run on a treadmill. Your input in the shape of the world is no longer needed. That's the general idea.
Thanks, I am not a musician so I found your comparison to it very interesting. I otherwise agree with everything you've said and I think the creative aspect is something that is absent from my alternate communities
What's interesting to me is that some of these communities are remaining strong despite the AI tidal wave. Although it might be my bubble. For instance, there is still a thriving art scene on instagram which has successfully demarcated itself from AI art. There is also a writing community on substack. Are there hobbyist programming communities out there that can keep the practice of human coding alive?
currently in my experience, no, there's a total collapse on the front of people making code by hand for the sake of art. In the past six months, I've begun to suspect that I might soon be the last person on the planet doing it without any AI assistance in my job. It's been a brutally fast change.
Maybe it's that to some people, earning something or creating something is more satisfying than stealing it, while to many other people it doesn't matter where it comes from. This is true in all walks of life. I never cheated on a test, but plenty of kids I knew did. Those people have no problem taking shortcuts because they don't understand the satisfaction of doing something right.
When a whole civilization falls victim to that mentality, we end up with zero responsibility and intellectual collapse.
Did you invent the alphabet? If not, then everything you've ever written or coded was theft.
The alphabet is everyone's to use freely. If the alphabet were distributed under a GPL, and I used it without attribution, that would be theft.
No, the alphabet was secret knowledge belonging only to the initiated priest class before people stole it and divulged it to the public. Now you owe their descendants royalties for a lifetime use of the alphabet, unless you're a thief.
Well, anyone can create an alphabet. You just take a font and change one character.
So anything you do can and will be stolen. There's no reason for you to make anything. Thank you for reinforcing my point.
> a lack of intellectual community.
The issue may be simpler than that. The technical cohort that's on the chopping block of automation right now uses seemingly sophisticated words to basically describe what the coal miners and human calculators felt in the past. When you compound this with the general struggle on the social skills dimension that defines the majority of this group, you can see why the idea of stepping out of their respective narrow field and getting a hobby would seem ludicrous.
There's always some anxiety around job security, that's nothing new. I've been around enough rounds of that to know it well. This isn't that.
We're talking about a fundamental disruption of knowledge work, to know that you might not even be able to pivot to something else. It's kind of like when people would callously tell the coal miners to "learn to code", except it's now "learn to be an electrician".
But I don't feel you're really acting in good faith here, with your negative stereotypes and derisive language.
So: the anxiety is real and not new, but this phase of automation is really unique and different, because of "fundamental" "disruption" of "knowledge work". Consider me convinced, since this line of reasoning is original and not accounted for in the comment you're replying to.
> When you compound this with the general struggle on the social skills dimension that defines the majority of this group
Really appreciate you going the extra mile to drive this point home.
Yea it’s probably deep seated horror at slowly being replaced. I’m not sure what I feel but ordering a clanker around everyday is exhausting both emotionally and intellectually. I would rather not even talk to the thing, but they fucking suck at software architecture no matter what anyone says. You can’t just leave them alone with a task because you get the worst designs 7/10 times. The other 3/10 scare me enough that I’ve started learning how to install solar and battery systems online.
I should probably read something about past instances of this; you mentioned coal miners and maybe hearing their stories will help us.
> I should probably read something about past instances of this; you mentioned coal miners and maybe hearing their stories will help us.
IMO it probably won't make you feel any better, for the following reasons:
1) The AI disruption is going to be far wider than any previous disruption, people will have much less chance to pivot to something else while continuing to do economically productive work, because not just one field is in danger, every field based on cognitive work is in danger (and all the manual labor isn't too far behind with robotics advances).
2) Even despite the more limited blast radius of prior work disruptions, they were still generally awful for the people who got disrupted. People love to cheerily talk about how the industrial revolution lead to a world of more, different, better, safer jobs and while that did happen, the newer world wasn't really for the people who were displaced, but rather people of the next generations. The people who were actively displaced were mostly hard fucked... economically destitute and emotionally damaged from loss of purpose.
Well I’m autistic so the way I learn about how to deal with feelings and emotions properly is through reading other folks stories.
I don’t know if I care about feeling better, exactly, I just want to know how to deal with the feelings and try not to destroy myself.
Nah, my wife is from an old coal mining family; her and her family are VASTLY better off than their immediate ancestors. I’d also suspect if said ancestors were alive now, they’d be happy to know that their descendants live in vastly better and safer world
IMO none of this is at odds with what I said. The test would be the ability to interview the ancestors in the past, near the end of their life, after they had lost their jobs. How happy were they then?
And in any case, should we move into a world with real ASI the outcome is going to be very different than the displacement of a single industry.
If an ASI replaces you at one cognitive job, it replaces you at all of them certainly faster than you can reasonably retrain.
> Sure, there's the obvious "I enjoy the mechanics of programming" component that's gone but then there's also this general feeling that is hard to shake which feels a little deeper. I've wondered about it. Is it all the layoffs? The suddenly shaky economics for a lot of our companies? The uncertainty of the career's future in general?
Internet town squares have polarized. Not just by capital P politics, but just according to the poles that inhabit them. The highly energized maximalists and doomers spend all of their time posting online about it, not really caring about whether the community or even reality conforms with their thoughts. The rest of us roll our eyes and leave the town squares. We laugh at them in our group chats, sneer at them at our parties, but we don't talk in the town squares about the absurdity anymore.
I don't really know what to do about this. When the SaaS boom was happening in the late 2000s/early 2010s, there was a tranche of cautiously optimistic and cautiously pessimistic bloggers, along with the highly motivated zealots. The middle is hollowed out now.
I really liked this. I've felt the exact thing the author is describing - I used to care a lot about my craft (iOS apps), and that has been blown apart by AI. Not that craft and taste isn't still a differentiator - I think it's just so much less satisfying to create something perfect over weeks, if you can get 80% of the way in an afternoon.
"Private intellectual activity that is sustained, complex, and long-term requires an external intellectual community to provide material and motivation, like fuel and oxidizer. That private activity, in turn, sustains the community..."
I think a lot of the greatest art has been produced by this kind of "scene". Music for example isn't created only by an individual, it comes from listening and watching and playing with others. Later, you sit down and all of that input turns into something brand new.
I think at the same time I started getting "out of coding", I started getting deeper into music. And if it was just me, that would've been a short lived thing. But having people in real life to play with and bounce off makes it about 100x better and keeps you going long after you would've fallen off on your own.
I'd encourage anyone who feels this way to find something similar. The act of creation is still as essential as before, you just need to direct your energy toward something more purely human. Get into writing, drawing, woodworking... even as these things are instantly mass-producible, we'll still value and pay for humans to do them.
I think this has really softened the blow for me!
I've been overhauling my parent's backyard. Mostly it's cleaning up decade's worth of clutter. From there there's regenerative visions for mulch, native plants, and intentional areas for life humans and critters alike. I'm learning a ton. What a great displacement for my creative energy with the added benefit of being physically demanding.
I'd add to your comment that AI is the thousand-ton cherry on top of the perfect storm. Covid destroyed our professional communities. Work doesn't and won't look like how it was pre-2020. AI just makes everything super weirder. It's hard, as a human, to cope.
This was my initial reaction as well. I have been thoroughly invested in the craft of software engineering for 3+ decades. From the blog posts mentioned in the all the way back to Byte magazine at the library as a 10 year old. But those days appear to be perhaps behind us now, as suggested in the article. I am grieving it, despite the fact I have embraced LLMs for creating software.
But I refuse to use LLMs for things like making music. I like your term "purely human". There's no place for fancy statistical engines in human art. Art belongs to human communities and human culture. Which is where, apparently, I will continue to find my refuge if not my living.
I am quite pro AI for various reasons, but for this reason I just don't see low effort AI art really taking off beyond memes, corporate promotional material, and porn. The value of art is the humanity behind it. It's the reason abstract modern painting continues to be valued despite many folks finding its absolute skill level to be lower than, say, the impressionists or modernists of yore.
Yeah, I'm thinking of the one time I was in a band where we gelled musically, and I noticed I started writing more/better music subconsciously. And a particular type of music that would fit with the band.
I think it's not always a voluntary response. If you're involved in some kind of social situation, your mind automatically points a certain way.
If you lack an enriching situation, then your mind might just get lost !
Yes. I've told a few friends and acquaintances that somehow AI is the least interesting technology in my lifetime - the boosters use AI to write about how they used AI to build new tools to help them AI their AI, the haters write (or sometimes, shockingly, use AI to write) about how AI will AI all of us. Have you tried this new skill? Read my research paper, it shows that AI can do good work unsupervised? Oh, yeah, that's interesting, what do you think about how it did X, Y, and Z? I dunno man, I didn't spend that much time on it.
It's getting lonely out there, even if or especially if you've converged on "I don't care much about AI".
If it had no other function than a better than Google search engine that is able to teach me topics I'm interested in at exactly my speed it would be the most interesting technology to come along in a while. The fact that it does all the other stuff it's doing is hard to even come to grips with in the time it's been around.
Have a lot of good conversations about what you learn?
I mostly learn about my passions / hobbies so interesting conversations w/ others that share them come up pretty much daily. That said I find there's a group of people who will shun me like I kicked their dog for having any interest in using AI, which I find unfortunate.
Yes. I find it unexciting in quite a surprising way, and yet I resent how much of my brain it is taking up.
It should be incredibly exciting. I try to find the interesting parts that I can relate to, build on, survive with. But instead it feels like an ominous, featureless thief-of-joy grey goo coming for everything.
I think this feeling crystallised when I saw someone had used it to rebuild Prince of Persia and my immediate gut reaction was quite clear: I wanted to scream “could you please just fucking leave one good thing unsullied!?”
> even if or especially if you've converged on "I don't care much about AI"
I don't care much about AI but hot damn it makes working on the things I do care about easier.
We use it a lot at work (soft eng) and my job has slowly morphed into "Okay how do we continue shipping sane software when we effectively 10x'd our org size in six months as agents became reliable?". That has been pretty fun. I care about creating good software.
And I care about budgeting and finance projections for home finances, especially as a new baby entered the room. But I am very bad at spreadsheet fiddling. AI has been super helpful in doing the fiddling so I can focus on the thinking.
edit to add another example: I really care about managing my team and keeping us effective, but I hate playing ticket monkey. Offloading basic ticket management (agent, make me a ticket; take this thread and create 3 tickets; respond back when tickets are done; etc) to an agent has been great
That’s great! I unironically hope you find those things interesting and AI has opened them up for you. I’m not trying to be snarky, but - along the lines of my attempted point upthread - has any of that led to an interesting conversation? An exchange of information with other humans? Or at least taken something dull out of the way so the actual interesting conversation can take place?
> has any of that led to an interesting conversation? An exchange of information with other humans? Or at least taken something dull out of the way so the actual interesting conversation can take place?
Yes! Lots.
It’s kinda similar to the concept that money doesn’t buy happiness, it buys time to do the things and see people who make you happy. Offloading drudgery to computers buys time to do the human stuff
For example: you can have a much more invigorating discussion with a coworker if every iteration takes 2 minutes instead of 2 hours. Moves from an async “let’s schedule a followup” to a lively real time collaboration
Or the budgets example, we could have a conversation about values and priorities because chatgpt made me a UI that let us drag sliders around and see the impact of our decisions in real-time.
It seems we (now more than ever) have to fight for fun, fight for a shared meaningful reality. Arriving again at the idea that enlightenment is a group activity.
I did my Masters in ML and a decade ago it seemed AI was so exciting. You could build relatively good models at home. Our university had a cluster that could train SOTA models. It seemed like every year we were discovering a breakthrough new neural net structure.
Nowadays all the development is done at a bigtech lab, and you aren't going to be able to tell anyone about it. Everyone else is relegated to interacting with slightly larger and larger LLMs over an API. On one hand it's cool that the tech is now far more accessible and impactful, but on the other AI has become immensely boring.
It's a little uncharitable take as I know some people are doing some cool innovative stuff still, and not every tech needs to be new forever anyway. I would feel less strongly if it wasn't impossible to not keep hearing about it :)
I always thought the ML stuff was boring... Computational Neuroscience on the other hand ;)
I mean, to me, this is very similar to how it was when "the web" came into its current pervasive form. You could write exactly this comment about how people were writing about how they liked the web, on the web, and also about how they didn't like it, maybe shockingly, also on the web, etc. etc.
To me, this is just how it is when a new paradigm hits the scene. Whether it's good or bad, whether you care for it or not, it is pervasive.
The web was a shared experience, by its very nature. The interconnection was the point. LLMs allow anyone to put themselves in a one-man bubble of their own creation. In a way, it is the antithesis of the internet - if the web is a global public square, the API is a digital cloister.
Pretty much by definition, a new paradigm will be very different from the previously new paradigm.
Personally, I don't think the interconnected "social" nature of the web turned out very well. Maybe (probably) the "one-man bubble" nature of AI also won't turn out well. But I'm skeptical of holding up the web's social nature as a positive. I think it turned out pretty bad. (I shared everyone's optimism in the late 90s and early 2000s and I used to just be mad at Facebook / Zuckerberg for screwing it up, but I dunno, maybe it was always going to end up this way.)
But you could still focus on backend stuff and desktop or CLI programs, think and discuss about programming languages and software engineering on the code level in all the non-web related ways with a large community. You could opt-out of most of the web-related things (which is what I did) and still have a wide community to interact with. Whereas AI appears to be dissolving almost all that community. I hope that will turn out to be a false appearance, but the thesis is that it won’t.
Ok but I think this is just a kind of myopic view that is specifically focused on the things you were / are interested in. AI is a different paradigm that is changing things for a different contingent of people.
To try to demonstrate my point with an example: If you were a journalist, the web changed literally everything in a way that was inescapable. As a software engineer, it changed a lot for a lot of people but it was not inescapable. The situation with AI is, so far, the reverse. Journalists have mostly (and correctly IMO) concluded that this isn't actually that useful to their writing, and it hasn't changed their distribution channels in the way the web did. But for software engineers, it's changing things dramatically.
I guess my perspective is just that new paradigms are not uniformly disruptive.
The article is about how AI affects intellectual communities. In my comment above I was focusing on the software engineering community that the first part of the article was discussing, and which I mistakenly took your comment to be referring to.
It’s probably right that when looking at the total of all intellectual communities, the difference in influence of the web versus AI is more nuanced. Nevertheless, I can see AI being more disruptive there overall in the way the article describes. Though I hope that this will turn out to not be the case.
No I don't think you misunderstood, I do think I broadened my take between my comment and my reply to you. I don't mean to imply that I think I have this all figured out or anything, I'm still playing with these ideas in my own mind and trying to figure out what I think.
But I do think that my general sense is that it is both similar in scale to the disruption of the web, and also very different in ways that are hard to suss out at this point.
There's several things I disagree with in this post (a matter of perspective, I think):
> The discourse around software engineering has gotten dumber. It’s like everyone in the industry lost 30 IQ points. People used to talk about compilers, type systems, logic. Now they talk about “prompts”, “harnesses”, “loops”. The discourse is narrower, shallower, and more repetitive. There’s only so many times I can hear about “agentic harnesses” before I lose my mind.
I agree with the frustration here :)
> You design a revolutionary new programming language: who cares? Maybe Claude cares, for what that’s worth. But humans don’t write or even read the code anymore. The programming language is an implementation detail the humans no longer have to care about.
Perhaps the people who weren't inclined to think about compilers, type systems, and logic before coding agents will never think about those things. If anything, I think about those systems significantly more now, because I view them as ways to describe the search space for the agent ... and perhaps, in the future, even tools to structure agentic latent representations.
So I propose rotating your viewport: yes, perhaps entertain the idea that it doesn't make sense to think about these things for human consumption ... but instead, what if we think of programming language and compiler design as being a tool to control the search space, and suddenly there's lots of new ways to think about these things.
Is this a valuable way to think? I'm not sure, but we should try and find out.
I agree with you and disagree with the OP in similar ways.
I work on my own "agentically-engineered" projects and the pursuit of certain ideas for what you're calling intrinsic motivation, and I don't particularly care if others find it interesting or even find it at all or not, because the ideas themselves are cool to me.
It's kind of like I can suddenly tinker at 2,000% efficiency and share what I'm doing, _and if someone else finds it interesting, that's cool too_
Isn’t the point you’re making what OP is saying - that there are of course some humans who have deep intrinsic motivation, and they’ll continue to do what they do, but most humans aren’t wired this way, and for that, society will collapse?
Worse, that this "intrinsic" motivation was developed within an existing intellectual community -- so where does the next generation acquire it?
The community is reqiured for both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, just over different time horizons.
I wrote a blog post making some very similar arguments earlier this week in response to some mathematicians’ takes—just before the OpenAI paper drop a few days ago (https://creating.software/essays/ai-and-math/).
I feel we’re all realizing, at the same time, that (1) intellectual activity is communal, and yet (2) those communities are sustained by recognition of individual achievement. What a way to find this out.
I claim (here and in my post) that humanity actually can’t advance without these human communities. It’s critical that people not give up learning things that AI knows better than they do, because they play an important role in these communities, and the community is critical.
My (maybe naive) hope is still that people find ways to keep doing this stuff for fun, like chess (competitions, awards, coaches, I don’t know). We still have chess competitions and the like, even though computers are far better at chess and have been for a while. The community and the recognition of individual achievement are both there. And human chess and chess engines have gotten vastly better, so computer dominance failed to kill progress in chess (today’s stockfish would’ve beaten Kasparov in 1997 running on a desktop from 1994: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4MLBK7iCW3vYd93Mn/a-closer-l...)
Maybe math olympiads and programming contests live on well past the end of their practical utility—I always liked them.
The author brings up several examples along the lines of: 'why write a blog post about how something was built' or 'why bother making a technical note public', or 'why bother writing a new language', etc, since the LLMs will just ingest it and never credit you and no one will know.
What this really points to is a new ecosystem which is now built on theft.
I agree, the depression is real, and it has destroyed the community of code as well as the individual spirit of wanting to do, well, anything. What's the point of building anything? Anyone could prompt an AI to get some result, there is no real intelligence necessary. But what has led to this situation? Theft. The plundering of all our collective work and all the intellectual effort that was put into it.
This became really clear to me today while I was playing around with the new Illustrator/Photoshop AI-coded ripoffs of the Adobe suite. (Excuse me, VectorCraft is an "open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Illustrator, rebuilt in pure Rust" per their Github).
I may loathe Adobe and wish I didn't have to pay them another dime. But there is a fundamental difference between a group of people sitting down to build a replacement for Illustrator (like e.g. Affinity), and someone prompting an AI to just rewrite Illustrator from scratch. The AI is laundering other people's work. The AI contains a compressed version of billions of lines of code, and from that it is unpacking essentially a pirated Frankenstein binary, washed of attribution. It may have no lines of code in common with Illustrator, but everything it has was taken from code that someone wrote.
Imagine someone writes a book and you want to distribute it for free. If you reconstruct the book by taking random words clipped out of newspapers and pasted together, that's still a copy of the book.
The question is, what's anyone's motivation to write anything anymore? Who's going to write a new, better language? But we would not be in this situation except for the grand theft which allowed the creation of LLMs in the first place.
I didn't buy into the "copying unauthorized zeros and ones is theft" narrative (because it's not even an argument) when old music industry executives were screaming about Napster, and I'm certainly not gonna start now.
There's absolutely a moral debate to be had in this topic, but if your starting position is redefining common language and twist the meaning of words beyond reason, then you've already shut it down before it's even started.
I don't think it's twisting common language, but let me clarify: Tensors are a form of compression. If I take a song that a musician put out for free, convert it to a different file format and sell it (that's the key here, the commercial use), that's theft. It was theft when it was Napster, too, but even then there's a big difference between freely distributing pirated stuff and selling it.
The LLMs hoovered up everything, compressed it, and put it up for sale as bootleg IP. That's especially offensive since so much of what they took was already freely available with attribution.
> Tensors are a form of compression
This is an incorrect understanding of machine learning data-structrues.
A data structure which encodes a bunch of square vectors as input, stores them in a multi-gigabyte file, and uses weights across layers of them to generate an output is no different from any simple compression algorithm or a bunch of convolution kernels.
Just saying those words doesn't make it so.
I think your issue is believing that Imaginary Property rights exist at all (especially since you’re basically advocating for software patents with this: “ It may have no lines of code in common with Illustrator, but everything it has was taken from code that someone wrote.”). Heck, how is a human supposed to learn in your view then?
Why is the argument "well it's fine when a human does it". It's not a human, or a living being, or even concious. It's software operating in our social plane (language) owned by a bunch of yahoos in the bay. They are lining their pockets reselling ideas from books they burned..not sure they should be given the same grace a lone individual reading Adobe's source code line by line.
It’s technology built, funded, and used by humans, so of course it’s fine to me. The rest just reads as a the usual political rant against the rich, which I simply couldn’t care less about if I tried.
Wait. If I build and fund a video streaming site that captures Netflix shows and lets everyone watch them for free, that's illegal and I'll go to jail. But if someone with a trillion dollars scrapes my code and incorporates it into a product they're selling access to, that's fine?
If they get no attribution and have no financial incentive, why should a person create anything? You can wish for a world without property rights, but we live in a world where there are property rights. The question therefore isn't whether the vacuuming of license-based IP violates your personal belief system or not, it's whether laws were broken or not.
This leaves us in a situation where some people can break laws and become enormously, almost infinitely wealthy, whereas other people cannot. And that is intolerable.
For example: I was a taxi driver in 2001 and I had a great idea. What if I started a company that gave people rides for money, with an SMS-based "app" that worked on a flip phone? I started coding it. The only trouble was, that would have been completely illegal. But when someone showed up with a bunch of VC and started doing it, regardless of the law, suddenly we entered a two-tiered world where I (as a cab driver) had to pay to be licensed and undergo inspections and be patrolled by a special taxi police force, whereas they didn't. And I couldn't change my prices to compete.
Now we've gone another level. Imagine I tell Claude to code me a backend and app that's a clone of Uber, and I distribute it to all the Uber drivers. Do you think, for one second, that I would be allowed to operate that business in the wild-west fashion that Uber operated when they started up? Or Airbnb?
Whether you like property rights or not, laws were broken in the training of LLMs, and the net result is a much less level playing field in which the property rights have now essentially all been coalesced into closed models which you have to pay to query. What was once created freely is now owned by Anthropic in the form of Claude, and charged for.
My contention is that this is a much more unequal situation than one in which every author owns, for a time, the right to profit from their own work or to gain recognition by attribution.
There are licenses which allow you to use open-source work, with attribution.
There’s a reason why so many concepts in the sciences are named after somebody. Usually it’s the discoverer.
I’ve got no idea what this implies about learning for humanity as whole, though.
> Heck, how is a human supposed to learn in your view then?
In your view then, it would be entirely legal for me to torrent all the movies in the world as long as I say it's "to learn"?
Isn't the fact that "anybody" can sit down and write a clone of Illustrator without years of work incredibly liberating?
If the tradeoff is giving up attribution, then is that worth giving this power to other people? This has and will made things that were previously impossible possible.
I think theft is a pretty strong term since what's been "stolen" is now freely available to everyone. People will have to find newer forms of motivation.
None of this work was previously found or accessible by people unless it found the right venues. For example, many people have written languages, only a few have gotten lucky enough to get on HN and get people even paying attention to them. In this new world, it's really not any different. If you find the right venues, people will know what you've created, if you don't as before, nobody will care or know.
>> what's been "stolen" is now freely available to everyone
Let me double check the cost of the API tokens I've spent on closed models this month.
Nope, not freely available.
FWIW, I think you'd have a much better information-wants-to-be-free argument if all the models were open-weight. It would still be theft, but not theft for profit, and there's a major difference between those things.
If you agree that LLM-produced code in this instance may have no LoCs in common with the source program, in what sense is this different to the replacement being written by humans? Humans also learn to write code by reading it and synthesising that reading to produce new code.
I agree that the motivation for such a consortium being formed is lower when LLMs can vomit out any program of which one can conceive, and I agree that the value in publishing is lower for no-one reading it/attributing it. But I think the functional replacement of a tool which is run in a way that is extortionate or exploitative is an objectively good outcome regardless of whether the replacing tool was small-batch bespoke artisanal Rust or synthetic Rust extruded from the bilgepipe.
Supposing there were a person or team who could rewrite Illustrator from scratch, it's still different from an AI rewriting it in a couple of ways.
Fundamentally, the people who are writing it are not property, they aren't an algorithm that has ingested other code and rearranged it. Therefore they are not simply a copying / pirating mechanism which can launder a pile of stolen code into a clean new application. At best they're either creative or they're pirates themselves.
When I write code, even if I want it to resemble something else and even if I resort to StackOverflow for help, I'm essentially writing. Nothing of that sort happens in the mechanical guts of an LLM.
What this really points to is a new ecosystem which is now built on theft.
Only if you redefine "theft" to mean learning from copyrighted material, which is more expansive than anything the RIAA or other copyright cartels have ever argued.
it has destroyed the community of code
Speak for yourself. I'm in a Discord where a bunch of people are working with AIs and each other to get Linux running on Apple Silicon Macs, and it's great to see the rapid progress.
It may have no lines of code in common with Illustrator, but everything it has was taken from code that someone wrote.
I have shocking news about where the code that you write comes from.
If you reconstruct the book by taking random words clipped out of newspapers and pasted together
Sure, which is irrelevant because that's not what LLMs do. ("What about this study that found that you can get them to recite paragraphs from Harry Potter?" Well, I can recite large portions of the Ghostbusters screenplay and my brain is not illegal).
The question is, what's anyone's motivation to write anything anymore?
I wanted a thing, so I built it, and made it available in case other people want it too. AI doesn't affect this other than making it possible to build things faster.
>> so I built it
You mean you instructed an AI to build it.
This is equivalent to, "I wanted to get a job, so I lied on my resume."
Also, there's a vast difference between you seeing something and copying the idea, and the world's largest companies taking everyone's ideas and reselling them, or laundering their piracy for profit.
Some call is theft, others call it a final liberation of information
Indeed in a weird way, one can also argue that this state is the ultimate copyleft.
If anybody can create any software anytime, everybody gets a lot of the Four Freedoms of Free Software (change it to make it do what you wish, distribute your modified version, etc), without even "having the source".
And all the programmers constantly feeding their new code into training is the contorted version of GPL'ing it.
>> all the programmers constantly feeding their new code into training
That's going to be approximately no one in a couple of years.
This is my belief. As I’ve said before, RMS would never need to write a printer driver if an agent could just RE it and write a replacement. Hell, I’ve now done that myself for a device that only had an old binary-only Linux driver.
That concept only works if it's actually free. It's not free, it's just under new ownership now that it's been heisted.
And the bigger problem is that no one's actually going to make anything new that these systems can ingest. So we enter a cycle of LLMs feeding off LLM output, and a parallel decline in human cognition and creation. All for the profit of a few people. Not at all for the liberation of information.
I am feeling pretty liberated with my local Qwen, it can make copies of software, reverse engineer hardware bootloaders in a harness so I can get rid of ads and bloatware, all offline and at the price of electricity and my compute.
LLMs actually _improved_ this for me, because they can be the sparring partner and the endless lexicon of interconnected thoughts, most other humans simply lack the ability to.
They do have their limits too, but I'd genuinely, objectively say that for me and how my brain is wired, they've given me the "community" context that the world could not really provide.
I do feel like I'm approaching the limits of what they can do there though. It's worse as soon as the things see the prompts of most public-facing harnesses, but even without that, they can only do so much.
Real humans would have a better intellectual community to offer, but for that, you actually need to find them first and hope that your schedules and energy budgets both align.
___
I think as much as we're seeing consequences of AI there, we're even more seeing the consequences of how society itself has been strip mined by big corps and big tech.
Human connection is dead not because of AI but because of Social Media.
Motivation is dead not because of AI or weakness but because spaces and contexts that would foster that have been replaced with corporate-approved standardized gray.
Globalization plays a role here. Atomization. Urbanization.
The expectation to hop around the nation for your job, nuking any ability at building a local community.
Context collapse glueing massive amounts over overhead on every single communication transmission.
Etc etc.
AI is often not a cause but just an accelerator.
You do realize Americans are /less/ likely to move now than 100 years ago? And how is urbanization, which allows more human interaction, not less, a problem? (Not very many hackerspaces, art studios, research libraries, comic cons, symphonies, etc etc in rural areas).
Just throwing more people into the same small space doesn't necessarily mean that they suddenly start interacting with each other more.
In fact, the opposite can happen, where investment into local social community building stalls completely, because why even bother? Why would you listen to ramblings you do not really care about when there is an infinite supply of new people that don't in this very moment?
That's one mechanism. There are many more.
Urbanization is good on paper, but has many shortcomings. Hypothetically, it should be the most efficient and best solution. That hypothetical just leaves out how humans actually work.
"Private intellectual activity that is sustained, complex, and long-term requires an external intellectual community to provide material and motivation, like fuel and oxidizer."
Aside from programming, one of my main interests is reading and writing. I think that literary fiction proves what the author is saying above. Even the most reclusive, private authors (Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, etc.) actually published their work. They contributed to the community and took part as readers. Literature is always in conversation with itself. And although literary fiction may seem not to have the sway it once did in society, it is flourishing among the people who care about it (like me).
My thoughts aren't fully formed, but I find it interesting to situate technical pursuits like software engineering with humanities. And anyway, I've always felt that programming is both a science and art.
Kafka didn’t publish his work, and I’d expect that he’s just one we happen to know about, others are likely lost to time.
Indeed there are people who don't contribute to the community. Or maybe they can't find a publisher. I'm sure there are brilliant things written which will never find an audience.
But the broader point, in agreement with the article, is that the existence of fiction depends in part on extrinsic motivation (e.g. publishing, finding readers) and a community of intellectuals engaging with one another through their work. If everyone decided to stop seeking readers all of a sudden, the field would die and become a museum (mausoleum?) of former thinkers.
Contributing to the community posthumously still counts as contributing.
Kafka did publish some of his work during his lifetime, including The Metamorphosis.
Yes, but much of it wasn’t, which was my point, as it’s simply the first case that comes to mind where we know an author demanded their unpublished work be destroyed (Terry Pratchett is another). And Kafka didn’t receive widespread recognition until after his death, when Brod started publishing his writings en masse.
Hm, but I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you saying that Kafka is a counterexample to the need for external motivation? It's true that some of his best-known work was only published only after his death (which was against his wishes, though Brod had supposedly told him that he would not destroy his works). But he did still have external motivation, e.g. Brod encouraged him, and Kafka read aloud some of his work to his friends. Also, we should be careful about interpreting his wish to destroy his unpublished works in a certain way; much of it was unfinished, and he was kind of a perfectionist.
Beautiful article. I am here to pick a nit and restate something that I've blabbed about here and elsewhere a few times before.
> Prompting is not a skill, at least, it’s a much shallower skill than software engineering. The instrumental dimension of the work has improved in that people can get more output per unit of effort, but the dimension of work that’s about building up human capital has collapsed.
I think that this is incorrect in a specific literal sense, but not in any way that changes the broader effect.
I think that "prompting" is in fact a deep skill, but not one that practically anyone has cultivated to any reasonable degree, for the simple reason that the tools change faster than anyone grip can acclimate to them.
Nobody on earth mastered the effective co-working with Sonnet 3.5. That model was a lightswitch moment for me personally. I built an agentic harness for it to convert a medium-large vue-class-component framework into vue-3's composition API, rescuing a personal project from certain doom of software rot.
I can say that I got a lot out of that model and that my own usage was (if I can say so) ahead of the curve. But with hindsight, I know that I barely scratched the surface of what it was capable of. Have I continued to hone my Sonnet 3.5 harness? Of course not. I have started over (or at least reset many assumptions) a dozen times since then. Even if I were so inclined - in the way that I am inclined to learn Chopin's Nocturnes - the model is now unavailable.
The ship has sailed.
So to the OP's point - it's not so much that skilled usage has disappeared, but that skills are self-obsoleting faster than any real degree of mastery can set in. And as an immediate consequence, the churn is too quick for anything resembling a relationship of apprenticeship. This is effectively a cultural singularity where, yes, we are each of us drifting much more alone.
Great point, whole harnesses and concepts like "loops" are obsolete in a matter of months. I think it was just 6 months ago that the GPT-5.x models needed a harness with an edit tool that took arguments in the form of a diff, otherwise the model would have trouble editing any files. Flash forward to 3 months ago and the Claude models now skip the edit tool and use the bash tool with some `sed` command 90% of the time.
It's sort of like a "bitter lesson" for all of software. Attempting to polish our tools isn't very useful when the tools are themselves these fluid minds that get general upgrades every month, and now every couple weeks.
It's a fantasy but I wonder if you were to wave a magic wand and pause model releases for 10 years if some of these areas would develop their own depth.
This really speaks to me, and Terence Tao literally wrote something very similar few days ago [1] where he advocates for a more holistic approach to intellectual fields, and the value of community building.
On a personal level I had so many to-dos, like learning Rust "properly", but I feel incredibly demotivated now, because I can just get Opus or Sol to do it. But maybe I just need to block out one day a week to be my "no AI day", and just do it.
[1] https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117395269325940185
Amazing read. AI indeed completely annihilated every other topic. You can go to any tech conference these days and anything that isn't related to AI just feels so irrelevant. It wasn't like this at all for crypto, NFT or any other hype topic of the day.
I would wager that people who do mathematics for a hobby are not at all concerned about AI.
I'm a technical guy (physics background) who has let his math skills get mildly rusty (SW for a living). In the rare moments that I have time, I try to solve some math problems. That an LLM can solve them doesn't bother me in the least. The joy is not in the result, but in using one's brain to solve a "puzzle". I actually enjoy comparing my answer with the LLM's.
That a program could easily solve a crossword puzzle doesn't make them less fun.
That Deep Blue could beat anyone at chess didn't stop people from playing it. Ditto Go.
My friend (an actual math professor) still likes solving math puzzles and discussing them with me. So I'm not an island. I think the island issue is for people who like to discuss these things with strangers online. There will always be the annoying guy who'll use the LLM and "poison" the conversation. But if you have a community of people you know in person, it's less of a problem.
Math academics: Sure, I can see the worry. Hobbyists? Not really.
Software is a bit different, and always has been dichotomous. Some enjoy for the pleasure of brainstorming a solution, as well as exploring different modes of thinking, along with enjoying the elegance of their setups (be it algorithmic or build scripts or unit tests). Others enjoy programming for what it can do for them (the "result"). Of course, the intersection of the two sets is nonempty. For SW, I think the angst comes mostly from the first crowd.
I too am in the intersection, and it does suck. But long before LLMs came around, I had a big list of things I'd like to do in my life - not just SW - and knew I didn't have time to do even 10% of them. That doing certain types of SW is not fun any more isn't a big deal. I can work on other projects.
I’ve got a physics background too and have been working in SW for 20+ years. For me the angst comes from perhaps not making a living. Do you feel certain that your ”other projects” will pay the bills, or are you fortunate enough to not have to think about that? What are the ”other projects” if I may ask?
Oh, for a living, I definitely had concerns. I suspect that much of the angst in the article was about how it affects all endeavors, including hobbies. I'm pushing back on that.
I appreciate the quick cut to calling out how disciplines suffer from lack of community - this point feels right, though calling AI out specifically falls a bit short for me. AI didn't make music clubs fail as businesses during upticks in property values in my city and it didn't move the arts scene to the outskirts when owners tried to cash in on said uptick, or kill the free print things that kept people in the actual physical local community in the loop. But yeah community sufferred.
I'm don't think I'm a booster - I'm personally struggling to keep the value of craft and taste in mind when I read such stuff; I believe those things will remain human-driven. Hopefully we can all agree there is a population out there using Claude or Chat to finish half-started or previously-aborted projects because they now have a (canned) accountability partner, projects that weren't economically feasible, where part of the prototyping thought process a funding picture and Total Addressable Market discussion. They may be super-niche and not sustainable businesses. You could even extend your community-building desires if you chose to.
Why isn't there more idea-maxxing happening, where we come together and workshop what we can actually accomplish for next to nothing timewise, but have some real positive impact? Like nurturing a community of your choice.
This is just me running an OODA loop - I see lots of crap / low-impact to humanity actions taking place. DM me for a virt coffee (see my profile) if you wanna talk some more about this 1:1.
I am super sympathetic with the bleak outlook, but it's not in my nature to stay focused there.
> Why learn to code at all? The computers can do that for us. And so the rigorous, systematic thinking you need to practice in order to be a good programmer: all gone. The machines can be rational for us. We can just vibe.
This is how we manifest Forster’s _The Machine Stops_. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
> ...write blog posts to share ideas or inspire other people,...
Yeah, this is still there. I get a lot from other people's posts. VictorTaelin's memory system was pretty cool and I implemented a variant of it https://x.com/VictorTaelin/status/2081453432318132603?s=20
I write down what I learn mostly as a note to myself https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-10-03/AI_Updates
It's all fine. The world is just as good as it was before but we can do more. And Taelin's technique is pretty cool. It's just that some large amount of ideas I'd learned are now not unique and some new ideas are coming to exist.
The premise here is that, “software engineering is solved.” That is not a valid statement. There is nothing to, “solve.” Engineering is a practice; not a game or puzzle with a solution. It is a way of developing software.
I take the view that we should continue to practice software engineering. Every time you let an LLM generate some code for you is one opportunity you’ve missed to flex your muscle. If you don’t use it, you lose it. Just as you can lose vocabulary and the ability to read over time: these are not skills inherent to us! They’re learned and they must be practiced or else they will disappear.
There are ways to use these systems, if you find them ethically agreeable, in the practice of software engineering. But it cannot replace it. That part is the shared legacy inherited and preserved by each of us practicing it.
I think the author would probably agree that the profession of software engineering still has important responsibilities in the age of agents. He says so himself about his new day-to-day role:
> In my professional life, I’m happy to move one level up to become a manager of AI agents. I’m literate, I’m a good technical writer, I can describe what I want and let AI agents write the code.
Regarding continuing to practice software engineering, it is a noble ideal, but do you have an answer to the erosion of community described in the article? For instance, do you have suggestions for the author for how they might still feel motivated to invent a new programming language?
I think there are things we can do to preserve our intellectual practice, like intentionally forming communities that only do traditional coding (much like how human-only art communities still exist), but it's useful to suggest these concretely if you have any in mind.
If you want to create a programming language, create one. Do it because you enjoy it and because you have to answer a burning question. Learn how to formalize a language. Decide on whether to do that with operational or denotational semantics. Understand IR, optimization pipelines, and all that. Every moment spent on acquiring this knowledge is not lost and the time is not wasted. You’re enriched by it!
There are other people out there doing the same thing. Share with them. They’re more than happy to find like minded people.
Choosing to give up is not the answer. Claiming that engineering is, “solved,” is promoting a false narrative. It’s almost nihilist. Defeatist at least. Don’t even admit it or repeat it. It’s just not true.
All of the crypto bros told us how inevitable their technology was. We didn’t have to argue. Their constant chirping just got annoying and now look. They’re basically gone having exhausted the well.
A lot of LLM technology is in the same boat. You have a bunch of noisy people lying and hyping up the technology to line their pockets. History will sort them out too. You don’t have to give bad arguments space.
I think the worst effect AI has had on our industry is this malaise that has settled in and convinced so many people to give up, stop contributing, and accept the future that the hype bros have made up. They’re the ones getting rid of jobs, telling everyone they’re gonna get replaced, that there’s no need to learn programming or how to do software engineering.
Software engineering is going to be more important than ever. Despite the astonished claims of the intermediate beginners that Claude one-shotted the app they couldn’t be bothered to learn how to build for six years… it doesn’t magically generate good software. It can do a lot but at the end of the day it still needs a human operator to understand its output and direct the harnesses.
The thing to watch out for is people giving up on engineering as a profession. Software has barely entered that arena. But if we start vibe coding air traffic control software, it’s probably time to stop flying.
The point of software engineering hasn’t been to generate code. It’s to understand what the heck we are building. To develop the processes, techniques, wisdom, and knowledge to direct the work. To bounce between theory and application and back again. To better ourselves and make computers do useful things.
What makes you so certain that this 'way of developing software' cannot eventually be understood and practiced by AI?
I think precisely the premise of the blog post is that there will be a moment (sooner or later) where flexing that 'engineering' muscle to avoid it disappearing is irrelevant, in that this muscle will not be needed due to AI replacing it.
So it seems you are rejecting this premise?
Yes, precisely.
People can choose to stop practicing it. Like they choose to not learn cursive or shorthand and they choose to stop reading long form books and essays. If people stop practicing software engineering then yes, it will disappear.
AI won’t replace it. It’s not human. It doesn’t think, feel, reason, care about, have thoughts or visions of the future. It doesn’t wake up in the morning or dream at night. It doesn’t get inspired. It doesn’t talk with other people and collaborate and share stories with them in the evenings about the struggles they’ve had working on a hard problem.
It’s an algorithm that runs on a machine that performs query analysis and inference on a model.
It can’t tell you what you want, that your specification is wrong, that you’re better off choosing a different avenue.
It doesn’t enrich your own knowledge and practice using it.
Sure, it can be used to generate lots of code. We can tweak the harnesses and parameters to optimize it to solve many classes of problems. But what do you think engineering is?
I don’t think AI is going to replace people. People are going to choose to do that. And some of use are going to believe them. Some of us aren’t.
A quote attributed to Pablo Picasso expresses it well: “What good are computers? They can only give you answers.”
> It can’t tell you what you want, that your specification is wrong, that you’re better off choosing a different avenue.
I’m sorry, but I’m baffled by this? I’ve had plenty of times where I’ve had an agent check a spec or propose alternatives. And for that matter, I also read novels now on recommendation of an LLM using my existing favorite books, that’s pretty explicitly telling me what I want.
> What makes you so certain that this 'way of developing software' cannot eventually be understood and practiced by AI?
That doesn't make it solved though. I also take issue with specifically "software engineering is a solved problem". Even Boris from Anthropic said it =( I thought he'd be the one to understand more deeply.
If we translate the criticism charitably "solving" anything is pretty aggressive with regard to the long tail of nuance and care and effort and mastery and such. I think that's what we should focus on. When we proclaim that a discipline that people have spent large parts of their lives mastering is "solved" it doesnt' feel so great. That doesn't prove otherwise, but at least let's get to the root of the meaning. I don't think it's solved. If we understand that software is really about solving human problems through technology, within real-life constraints, then AI isn't very good at that. It doesn't have "taste" is the soundbite. It is the root cause of why AI slop is called AI slop.
I suspect part of the taste problem is that the average person…has no taste (which is why so much AI slop is being shared to begin with). I also see no reason to believe that this isn’t a problem to be fixed, rather than some inherit limitation of generative AI.
That's fair but maybe it's a dangling carrot. Human taste will always be just out of reach for most, robots included. Avante-garde had it right all along.
>Without community, you don’t get isolated individuals each working on their own things: you get nothing
At least in the US this is something that's been dissolving for a long time. The rugged individualist thing has been around forever but it seems to be getting stronger and stronger. The internet itself really seemed to kill a lot of local communities, which at first wasn't terrible but has web 2.0 and social media commercialized our attention the platforms were no longer about connecting. Then add in all the disruptions of bots and trolls that are faceless and unrelenting on the net it's not terribly surprising that AI invaded so easily.
I don't disagree that the community of software engineering will diminish. What was once a skilled trade is now an unskilled trade.
But I think the intellectual activity will just migrate somewhere else, once all the dust has settled.
People who are intrinsically motivated will continue to be intrinsically motivated and new communities will pop up around new domains.
Coding only came into being 70 years ago. It's not some fundamental human institution.
We're all just going to have to adapt. The wheel turns.
I used to get calls often from my friends to ask me questions about my area of expertise. Not urgent things, just friendly "hey--what if..." kinds of questions.
Without the question, they might have never called. But because they called, we usually ended up just talking about other things too. Life. Girls. Work.
I rarely get calls like that anymore. It breaks my heart.
For the last few years, me and my friend have been working on a toy problem together. It's a problem that the most recent wave of LLMs can almost certainly solve and probably even one-shot. We now realize that no one's going to read our paper if we ever decide to publish our work. But we still use our weekly meetings to talk about things and make little progress here and there, come up with new questions, etc. It's bittersweet.
This sounds like a bummer. But honestly I can't relate to this at all. I've never gotten calls like that. It's just not what my relationships with friends and family have ever been about. (Nobody cares about my expertise, and to the extent they have, they always just wanted me to fix their virus interested windows xp machine, because that's the limit of their understanding of what "computer people" know about, and I always hated that!)
But there is an intellectual community, it’s just about those pesky prompts, loops and harnesses.
The assembly community is not thriving, and an arithmetic community is not a thing.
It’s a lacking metaphor, sure. But it points to how these processes have happened many times before.
The author disses these new concepts as “shallower”, but in reality they reality they’re just newer.
What they consider deep discussion of compilers (as if that’s a big part of software engineering and not a niche that interested 0.01% of them) is the result of decades of building the field.
Will AIs build a deeper field or act differently, I do not know. But it feels like the author is mostly discussing the current state of the world, and to me that states feels as if it’s just a repeat of history.
The end result of this is either AI annihilates human value, and we become pets or are annihilated ourselves, or AI is restricted to never pass a certain level.
How beautiful it is that the author gives a two-line summary of the post, right at the beginning:
> In this post, I argue that individual intellectual activity can only be sustained in an intellectual community of other humans. AI dissolves these communities, which in turn makes private intellectual activity rarer.
I know now that it will be joyful to read it all.
Some men are islands. I'm a bloody island; I'm bloody Ibiza.
As someone who has lived in islands like Ibiza and Lanzarote, it is shocking for me the use of "an island is an isolated place" mentality.
Maybe is people used to drive for moving, not imagining anything else as a possibility. People living in islands learn to pilot a boat and boom, you can move all around the Mediterranean and even the world.
Islands in the Mediterranean were the most connected things you could get in ancient times. And islands today continue being one of the most connected things there are.
In Ibiza there was ancient contact with Romans, Greeks, Carthaginians, Arabs, vikings, and later people from Aragon, Napoli, and Turks, then the French, the British, the Germans, then the Americans. The American hippies that hid from Vietnam occupied the island, Russian oligarchs on their yachts and later the Germans.
Almost everybody there living from tourism and commerce, not specially isolated disciplines.
The Canary Islands were the essential link between America and Europe.
It is over ten times cheaper to transport anything by sea than by land. Go to Ethiopia or Central African Republic to see how not having access to sea is a dramatic thing for a country.
Very well written. I tend to forget how important the people around me are, and as you say, force myself to act with the "high status" intrinsic motivation.
Recently, I'm in a context with extremely talented people I respect and want to impress to some extent. The difference is night and day
Incredible blog post! I've been very much disagreeing with most mathematicians on this topic and also getting kind of annoyed at how ineloquent they are at getting to the point.
This on the other hand has actually kind of swayed me over? I think it's still a massive net-benefit for society but I resonated a lot with the author's feelings and I want to understand how to cope with them myself, perhaps by joining groups of people who are still interested in pure software (which AI is a part of now).
The -30IQ line in particular reminded me of DHH's ramblings on Twitter the past few days.
Privacy community will probably never stop valuing that the code is actually human-readable with human level intent, purpose, and clarity, and that someone has read it hundreds of times and written it to be read that many times. It's been extremely interesting to work with ever better models to try to have it produce code that can do that, but with the clarity demands, LLMs still struggle doing anything more than accelerating a small subtask.
On AI and communication with others: before AI when joining a company, the first weeks was all about talking to team mates asking about the systems we own as a team, how things work, how to do X, how to get unstuck…
Nowadays you ask all of that to codex/claude. And it works. It’s a regression. I don’t mind spending 2h helping a colleague debugging an issue. It’s fun, it creates bonds and we both benefit from it (ofc my employer would think it’s a waste of time, but I couldn’t care less about what executive millionaires think)
>ofc my employer would think it’s a waste of time, but I couldn’t care less about what executive millionaires think)
Do you care about the ROI of the shares in your 401k or other retirement savings? People usually tend to pick the shares and funds that earn the most.
I feel like your response to AI depends in part also how much you find the status quo stimulating and interesting. If you are a social butterfly like the OP and already embedded and happy with communities, then of course AI will be a big loss in contrast. I do much agree with his assessment of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, though.
I think it’s a downward spiral:
-fewer people are asking questions because they’re asking AI instead or AI obviates the question by solving the challenge immediately.
-Asking a question is less likely to get you good answers because fewer people know the answers (or give you an AI response you could’ve generated yourself)
The thesis that intellectual activity will disappear due to AI is similar to the flawed logic people use against taxing billionaires. "If you tax billionaires, then no one is going to want to work hard!"
In reality, we are programmed to compete and produce and climb the social hierarchy. Intellectual achievement and its use as a delineator in society is not going away anytime soon. Your blog post is active, living proof of this.
It's just shifting... likely to more and more things that signal "hey, this was definitely not produced by AI" such as the lack of capitalization of sentences which has caught on.
Do you think status seeking will have a productive outlet without work?
I agree that prompting is a much shallower skill than engineering, and I really hate the term “prompt engineering” since I feel it puts something that (by design) is easy to learn on the same level as something relatively hard to learn.
There is admittedly a bit of skill to use these tools, but they’re really not hard to use. For the most part Claude can decipher my typo’d-to-hell prompt and figure out what I want, and even if it gets it wrong the first time I can usually correct it. The hardest part is determining some objective test for Claude Code to test against and “anchor” it, but I still think that’s easier than writing a bunch of unit and integration tests.
I like these tools; I think Claude Code is very useful and even if I didn’t like it I would still use it because it’s clear that’s where the world is headed and I want to stay competitive.
For personal projects I actually care about, I still write code by hand. I do think I write better code than Claude but I would still do it by hand even if I didn’t, just because I realized I was losing my intuition about software because I was outsourcing to Claude for everything.
There are plenty of things that I am honestly fine losing my intuition with. I don’t really derive much enjoyment from reading dmesg logs, and I am more than happy to let a robot have its fun with that, but it can take the mathey shit from my cold dead hands now.
The skill isn't "prompting", it is figuring out what to do, validating that it works the way you want, and thinking about how to best support future iterations of things you might want to do.
Which, not coincidentally, is pretty much the same description as what the job was already about.
I know, but even given that I really don’t think it’s that hard, and certainly not as hard as regular pre-AI software engineering.
We all like to act like “the hard part was figuring out what we want”, but I don’t think I really buy that anymore. Even when I really half-ass Claude prompts, it still usually figures out what I want well enough, and when it doesn’t it usually does once I give it correction.
I think this actually gets at a big part of what is causing this existential crisis. You're right, I don't think it was ever true that "the hard part was figuring out what we want". I think there have always been two hard parts: 1. Figuring out what is useful, and 2. Implementing a useful thing well. The second of these has gotten a lot easier, which means the first has become more important. But software engineers have long had a tendency to underrate that first part and consider it easy. I have long perceived a (to me) baffling arrogance that product management is an easier and less important job than software engineering. But that was never an accurate perspective, imo. And now that the "implementing things" job has gotten easier and the "figuring out what to implement" job has become more important, people with this perspective are really being thrown for a loop.
Product management is indeed an important but at the same time not very hard job.
This is the exact attitude that I'm talking about.
I delivered a number of complex products start to finish, in software and in hardware.
What even is product management? Just saying what you'd like? That's like equating the person ordering their meal with the person who will create it.
Both of the comments replying to my comment so far are just demonstrating exactly the point I'm making!
Yes, software engineers have a giant blind spot about "what even is product management" and don't think it's hard. This is exactly what I'm saying!
Maybe I don't think it's hard because I have a blind spot. That's possible.
It's also possible that I have no blind spot and it isn't hard though.
I think there is high uncertainty of how the world will change. My personal plan has two arms.
1) Be at the top of applying AI. The frontier overestimates of how able the average person is of applying what’s possible now. I would hope that with my software I can make money for a couple of more years. I constantly test my ideas on how far I can scale them through AI and what angles could be not as easily replicated. I’m aware that the average knowledge is catching up and I’m not faster. One could argue that also the expectation of how a software works gets higher. So users have lower attention spans want customized landing pages and UX needs to be more visual intuitive. So part of the gain in downstream benefitting users.
2) You can argue very long about 1) and I have arguments for both sides. So far it works for me and the numbers are on my side, however on the other side my plan B or 2) in this case is getting ready for life outside. I’m going in front of the camera I’m improving my talking skills I’m try to learn to build things. If you want if all knowledge work is gone. It’s literally entertainment, work with your body, serving or selling. I personally like entertainment most of that.
I’ve been trying to predict and I’ve changed my mind often, so now I’m just saying I don’t really know how the world’s gonna change.
What about all the intellectual communities springing up around AI use?
If you exclude the deep work on models themselves and just focus on use — harnesses etc. — then the intellectual community is basically prescientific. Very little meaningful empiricism. danluu's notes on benchmarks and experimental design come to mind: https://danluu.com/exercise-7/
This response confuses me, as I’m pretty sure OP is talking about AI use (i.e. applied use, from solving math problems to vibe coding to etc etc) not something like harness design or benchmarking? I’m also not sure what empiricism has to do with it, are non-scientists not intellectuals in your eyes?
Nope. There's a lot of unscientific intellectualism out there. I don't see a lot of intellectual depth in the communities springing up around AI use — I had vibecoding in particular in mind, and Fernando's blog post directly addresses mathematics.
I don't understand the contrast you're drawing. Harness design and benchmarking are major aspects of vibe coding (and solving math problems with LLMs, for that matter); I would go so far as to say harness design and benchmarking are the more intellectually serious aspects of vibecoding. Fernando is definitely aware of them as well. These just aren't meaningful substitutes for the intellectual work being diminished.
The author's contention is that the AI-in-software discourse is much less intellectual than software discourse previously was:
> The discourse around software engineering has gotten dumber. It’s like everyone in the industry lost 30 IQ points. People used to talk about compilers, type systems, logic. Now they talk about “prompts”, “harnesses”, “loops”. The discourse is narrower, shallower, and more repetitive. There’s only so many times I can hear about “agentic harnesses” before I lose my mind.
Can you give some examples? I'm interested, but out of the loop here.
> People used to talk about compilers, type systems, logic. Now they talk about “prompts”, “harnesses”, “loops”. The discourse is narrower, shallower, and more repetitive.
I feel like you can write a parody of this for every lower->higher level language change that's happened throughout history. I know LLMs are bigger change than going from ASM->C but it rhymes, at least to me. And I've never liked C, I've used pointers a handful of times in college and then thankfully never had to think about it again. I work in higher-level languages and that's not a thing I need to concern myself with.
I'm sure that statement will encourage name calling by some people or gasps in horror by people who work in C or similar languages but I've never enjoyed them. I find technology, computers, and program languages all fascinating and enjoy learning the history of it. I enjoy things like the Crash Bandicoot blog series talking about all the tricks they had to do to get the game to run on underpowered hardware and a SDK that didn't know what it wanted to be (my own re-wording) but I don't pine to go back to those days.
I see LLMs as just a step up the stack and making it easier for more people to create. Will it create a loss of parts of the art of programming? Undoubtedly. But I imagine there is a long list of people who used to be really good at some aspect of programming that a higher-level language removed the need for, that happens. This is happening on a _much_ larger scale, no doubt but it's the same concept.
> We care, and we should care, about contributing to the world. And if technology makes our contributions superfluous, then what is left?
It's made a specific aspect of our contributions (the actual writing of the code) superfluous but it hasn't removed all the other contributions. Maybe you all are using better models than I am (doubtful, I'm using Claude too) but "Idea -> Implementation" is much faster but "Implementation -> Polished Version" still takes a human (for now), at least in my experience. The LLM still writes the code to get to a polished state but there are tons of little UI/UX things it does badly and needs my guidance on. And, more importantly, writing code was never the hardest part of my job really, it was things like taking requests from the business side and turning them working code. The LLM makes parts of that easier for sure. I love being able to brainstorm and kick ideas around so easily or knock out a POC in an afternoon. However, there is still plenty of "human work" that needs done. I'm sure this will shift further, nothing is ever "settled", but when that happens I'll be looking at the next layer of problems I can solve.
I like solving problems, and yes, the LLM has taken away a whole slew of problems that I used to have to solve myself but I still see an unending ocean of problems to address that will satisfy me the same way writing code used it.
Semi-related: I believe so many people are writing "Software Factories" because it's the "next" problem to solve. Many of us looked up one level in the stack and said, "cool, now that the code is handled, how can I automate/improve the pipelines around that". I feel like as an industry there are many of us who effectively have been working to automate our jobs further, at least as a "background process" in our day-to-day, all along. Now we have a different part of that workflow to automate.
Ive felt like most of my software career has always been focused around automating my own job away and I've always loved it.
And nothing has changed for me except my standards are higher, I have better and more thorough testing, and I can iterate and do significantly more.
Throughout my career ive actually worked from some assembly work to higher level language. PowerPC-> x86 assembly. From c++ to typescript. And now with agentic work im still having the time of my life. It's actually resolved some of my personal focus and attention problems too.
I still push plenty of code to github and if only agents read it and it goes uncredited thats fine with me. Since its not like any of us ever really got publicly credited working at most corporations beyond an immediate team anyway. There are no credits on the big software I've contributed too.
The tools and scripts I build now have shifted to help human and agents work better together. Let agents do what they do better and help empower humans to do what they are better at still.
For the foreseeable future I am still quite optimistic and energized about continuing to do useful and productive work.
> Ive felt like most of my software career has always been focused around automating my own job away and I've always loved it.
Yep, this is pretty much exactly what I was trying to say.
And to the rest, I wholeheartedly agree. My ability to build and ship has been multiplied and continues to grow and I absolutely love it. There are growing pains and things are changing quickly but I find it exciting and energized as well.
It's only fun until you succeed and get fired!
Throughout the history of computing the number of developers has been climbing as has the demand. In that time the ability of 1 developer has increased, on average, to be able to accomplish more in the same amount of time/effort. Will the industry change? Undoubtedly, but automated out of a job? I doubt it. More companies will find it financially viable to hire a full-time developer who can do what would overwhelm a single person in the past, or hire a small team that can execute at the level of a much larger team.
What about the Isle of Man?
Time and Tide Wait for Gnome Ann: https://m.xkcd.com/1704/
> The programming language is an implementation detail the humans no longer have to care about.
If you believe this, you're in for a wild ride someday.
I wonder if this mixes up cause and effect. I've been working on several projects with AI tools to satisfy my intellectual and aesthetic curiosity. But I'm reluctant to share them--to engage with the community--because of the toxic discourse around usage of these tools. "Sure, I could post this cute Go library I worked on with Claude to /r/golang, but people will probably just say 'AI SLOP' and downvote it."
Communities of intelligent peers seeking knowledge and discussion will always exist: this is almost axiomatic. Perhaps they will leave their slopified peers behind and mostly exist in a cloistered form. Perhaps the technology they create will even help form their cloisters: for example, esoteric programming languages that LLMs can't easily work with.
".. unless his name is Madagascar."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AMqNG5KGaA&t=1s
AI seems to be revealing a lot of people get into industries like software engineering or math for a base external validation of their intelligence through their pursuits. The author realizes this and kind of handwaves it away in the last paragraph with some spurious generalizations. If you're not someone who organizes their self-esteem around being "intellectually necessary", this and all the handwringing reads as nonsense. AI hasn't taken away understanding for its own sake, local usefulness, arbitrating taste, or pure play. It's not an existential threat to the human need for community - only to the temperaments of a certain, vocal, subset who will need to evolve.
Good takes but you say that like it's NBD. Western civilization most definitely derives meaning and purpose from work. That in itself is a problem yes. But feel like you're shrugging and saying "told you so". Probably not so helpful.
Maybe it is NBD - the concept of deriving your meaning and purpose from "what you do" instead of "who you are" has always seemed vulgar, so in some ways this turning is simply a necessary comeuppance for that status-seeking mentality. If these folks can muster some of their newly idle individual intellectual activity towards unbinding their self-worth from public recognition, they'll be alright!
> the concept of deriving your meaning and purpose from "what you do" instead of "who you are" has always seemed vulgar
Then not being "vulgar" is only a privilege of the idle rich. When you do something for 8 hours a day, it can't not be a part of who you are.
>Maybe it is NBD - the concept of deriving your meaning and purpose from "what you do" instead of "who you are"
I spend 40 hours a week at my job. I have spent thousands of hours learning about programming, software engineering, and the domain knowledge for the niche that I work in.
In this time I have surely spent more of my waking time within the confines of an office building than I have with my wife and family.
You'll need to forgive me then if I let such a large part of my life bleed over into my identity.
he states is that no man is an island, but then states that "individual intellectual activity can only be sustained in an intellectual community of other humans", which I read as bieng "no man is an island, but all 'succesfull' men are islanders" which is true up to a point, as there are men who are reasonably comfortable with bieng adrift, or setting anchor or sail, as there mood or the weather requires.
Value of contributing/sharing small tools (< 5-10 thousands lines), that can be written by a LLM in an hour or two is perhaps too little to bother.
But it's still possible and useful to contribute (or to contribute to) complex well tested programs, that are just not reproducible in a weekend by a LLM.
Also organizing projects maybe in a form that makes them easy to reliably customize and extend by a LLM, if that's how the people will interact with open SW development in the future, may also be something useful.
Though I dunno what "complex" will mean in the future, if LLM can at the moment already write state of the art well tested C23 compliant re-targetable C compiler for various 16/8-bit MCUs, along with SW simulators, along with timing exact system verilog IP cores, for 5 different architectures, in two weekends on a cheap $100/mo. plan and it all just works. :) It's going to be hard.
Yeah as someone who has been working on multiple large scale systems projects entirely with agents…there’s not much left that can’t be built given the tokens and time (and patience of course…for now).
ctrl+f "capitalism" :(
I really don't get how you could miss this one, but I should have empathy -- he's presumably one of today's 10,000. But jeez... blaming "open source software isn't compensated" and "blogs are bad, now" on AI is just... yeah.
I find this perspective to be narrow and uncurious. AI is disrupting community -- it is not utterly dissolving it. I see no evidence of that. So many, including the OP, see AI as separator, an entombing force, somehow a black hole of intellect. In reality it is an evolution of the search engine which connects, navigates and further constructs digital civilization.
This assertion would look good beside some concrete examples.
Doesn’t that always seem to be the problem with the booster rhetoric. The upside is always somewhere in the hypothetical future while the downsides are already being acutely felt.
> So many, including the OP, see AI as separator, an entombing force, somehow a black hole of intellect.
Because the ultra-rich people who are building and controlling most of it are using it to do exactly those things to society, because they aren't capable of sharing this planet with the rest of us equitably. Were it being used to empower humanity (instead of just a small handful of the worst of us), I'm pretty sure the "AI haters" would be a tiny minority at most (if they existed at all).
In that vein, "Swapping Money For Expertise" [0] suggests that there's a political/power-dynamic at play for why this particular kind of AI is so appealing to your boss' boss:
> The fact that a theory-free AI might demand far more cash to accomplish a task (even a "solved" one like playing chess) than an expert [helping with a symbolic AI] would charge is beside the point. Billionaires have money, they don't have expertise. Theory-free inference is a bid to substitute one for the other: the beauty and terror of being able to manipulate the world without studying or understanding it is that it can be done with money alone. No experts needed.
> In a world in thrall to financial power, expertise is the only substantial form of power that can reliably contest the power of wealth. [...] This is why AI bosses are so violently allergic to the idea of hybridizing [machine learning] AI with symbolic systems that operate on models of the world.
[0] https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/06/nonfungible/
"No man is an island" is retarded. Literally retarded because nowadays we have internet and abundant information at our individual disposal. Things have changed and the failure to recognize this is retardation.
Almost nobody cares about intellectual activity. Not now, not before AI. People only care about status. That's all. The people who care about intellectual stuff are islands nowadays. They are all alone.
This is all good and full of great opinions but these are the same arguments used by artisans during the industrialization against machines. Does it matter really to hand over a large chunk of this work to AI, in the grand scheme of things? Not really. Most python apps were slop written by humans, the analogue of mass market goods. Same principle will apply here, high quality goods are still usually hand made even today. From a software standpoint, if you need something niche, max performance, max security or whatever you will probably hire the best humans instead of handing it over to Opus 7.8.
The wheels are in motion and there's pretty much nothing we can do to stop them.
Here's an analogy: People slowly developed skills on killing things; methods learned over thousands of hours and it is seen as a lifelong skill. These methods remain very useful for understanding the discipline of killing all of the various living things that need to be killed to sustain our modern world.
AI is a gun. Pulling the prompt trigger takes 99% of the effort out of the daily grind - point, shoot, reload.
Once the gun arrives, everyone that needs to kill is getting at least one gun. Use of the old knife, arrow, sword, etc. is downgraded from life skill to sport. The discipline remains intact, but just the parts needed to understand how it all is supposed to work remain useful. Nobody is getting paid to hunt with a sharp stick. Replace that stick with a rifle, and you've still got something.
This issue I have with this post is that it treats time saved with AI like a sunk cost. That isn't the case.
When AI allows you to think less about the how in software, every minute you save is a minute you can spend literally anywhere else. You aren't limited. There is no obligation to remain within the realm of software. You can use your saved time to watch a movie, read a book, or maybe dream of electric sheep. Whatever it is, there are no rules, and you get to choose.
So if you feel a loss of community from the advent of AI, you're completely free to find some other community which fulfills that same need for you. For me personally, AI has allowed me to focus much more on the design side of software, rather than the technical details. That's really meaningful for me, and it makes so that among my fellow design people, I've never had more community.
Anybody can do the same. Or maybe, you can find another outlet that suits you. The point is, you get to choose.
To put this in familiar economics terms, you can't treat your time like a sunk effort. Rather, you have to think of the opportunity cost, and ask yourself "what is the next best thing I could be doing with my time?"
> When AI allows you to think less about the how in software, every minute you save is a minute you can spend literally anywhere else. You aren't limited. There is no obligation to remain within the realm of software. You can use your saved time to watch a movie, read a book, or maybe dream of electric sheep.
Notice how you went from an intellectual, creative endeavour to a list of passive consumption behaviors. That is precisely the point the article was making. AI is killing everything that isn't just pure unthinking consumption.
Well, the post is arguing that even if you're free to find another community that fulfills an intellectual need for you, intellectual communities in general are growing weaker or being driven underground because AI is poisoning the commons and removing a source of external motivation.
For example, I enjoy blogging, and want to use the time saved from my software job to blog more. But I'm less motivated to blog these days because there's so much AI-generated slop blog content, and less readers as a result.
Part of this is because there's so much output that readers can no longer afford to spend as much attention on each piece of content. Another part is that it's harder to find fellow bloggers who truly care about the craft. When output was hard, anyone who wrote a lot clearly cared a lot. Now we have to use other signals to find kindred souls on the internet. One way is through social connections and private discords. Another way is through new technology which we can use to reclaim the commons, for example via Pangram which can demarcate what content is human-written vs. AI-written.