- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
The thing I hate the most about AI and it’s ease of access; the slow, painful death of the hacker soul—brought not by war or scarcity, but by convenience. By buttons. By bots. […]
There was once magic here. There was once madness.
Kids would stay up all night on IRC with bloodshot eyes, trying to render a cube in OpenGL without segfaulting their future. They cared. They would install Gentoo on a toaster just to see if it’d boot. They knew the smell of burnt voltage regulators and the exact line of assembly where Doom hit 10 FPS on their calculator. These were artists. They wrote code like jazz musicians—full of rage, precision, and divine chaos.
Now? We’re building a world where that curiosity gets lobotomized at the door. Some poor bastard—born to be great—is going to get told to “review this AI-generated patchset” for eight hours a day, until all that wonder calcifies into apathy. The terminal will become a spreadsheet. The debugger a coffin.
Unusually well-written piece on the threat AI poses to programming as an art form.
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It amazes me how often I see the argument that people react this way to all tech. To some extent that’s true, but it assumes that all tech turns out to be useful. History is littered with technologies that either didn’t work or didn’t turn out to serve any real purpose. This is why we’re all riding around in giant mono-wheel vehicles and Segways.
it’s ease
well-written
You sure? We do not applaud the tenor who cannot clear his throat.
I’m sure you could have a fruitful conversation with the crowd insisting it was written by AI. :)
The thing I hate the most about the printing press and its ease of access: the slow, painful death of the scribe’s soul—brought not by war or scarcity, but by convenience. By type. By machines. […]
There was once magic here. There was once madness.
Monks would stay up all night in candlelit scriptoriums with bloodshot eyes, trying to render illuminated manuscripts without smudging their life’s work. They cared. They would mix pigments from crushed beetles just to see if they’d hold. They knew the smell of burnt parchment and the exact angle of quill where their hand would cramp after six hours. These were artists. They wrote letters like master craftsmen—full of devotion, precision, and divine chaos.
Now? We’re building a world where that devotion gets mechanized at the door. Some poor bastard—born to be great—is going to get told to “review this Gutenberg broadsheet” for eight hours a day, until all that wonder calcifies into apathy. The scriptorium will become a print shop. The quill a lever.
The slow, painful death of technological privacy - brought not by war, not by scarcity, but by convenience of another app that saves you 3 clicks per transaction paired with the forced usage of certain functions within an existing environment
Stupid comparison, tbh. Scribing is just boring and repetitive work, programming is cognitive work.
That’s wildly incorrect and somehow serves to underscore the original point.
Scribes were not glorified photocopiers; they had to reconcile poorly written and translated sources, do a lot of research on imperfect and incomplete information, try to figure out if the notes in the margin should be included in future transcriptions, etc. Their work required real subject matter expertise, training and technique, was painstaking and excruciating, and many hand written manuscripts are absolutely works of art.
Then I apologise about my ignorance on the matter, but you’re now making the same point as the author - were you mocking or sharing their perspective?
There’s a lot that goes behind “work” that you don’t see in the final output. It’s important to care about that art, and a shallow copy is just not the same as “the real thing”. Right?
That’s something people have wondered since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Is a mechanically mass produced widget the real thing? People even make fun of the biological locally grown artisanal produced food and the recycled hand made furniture. Shein is quite popular with their fast fashion. Except the rich will have tailor made clothes of course.
Both, I think? Respecting the craft and expertise of the way we used to do things is important, but the author is being melodramatic and I wanted to poke some fun.
Old man shakes hands at clouds.
You can still do things the old way, AI existing does not impact your ability to do so.
People still make mechanical watches by hand. People choose to carve things instead of 3D printing them. People choose to drive stick instead of automatic.
I think at most of the disdain comes from the business side. Sure I can opt out of AI at home but at work I’m constantly getting asked how AI has helped my productivity and potentially “graded” on how much or how effectively I use it. Business doesn’t care about your personal fulfillment, just your productivity, and if they grind you into dust to w acchere you no longer find any joy or motivation in your work they’ll get the next college graduate that’s already used AI for 80% of their assignments and wonder why quality has tanked, integrations are failing, security breaches are up, and energy costs have doubled.
A coworker that regularly uses AI code assistants asked me to review 78 brand new files he made. That really puts my back against the wall. Do I spend a day going through everything “the old way”? Do I ask AI to summarize each function to bridge the gap in knowledge? Do I ask it, file by file, if it sees any issues? Or do I just rubber stamp it because I should the million-dollar product my boss thinks I should use more than Google or official docs?
Old man shakes hands at clouds.
I love the ageism in this “but you’re just old” defence. It was comically bad when your parents told you to wear your seatbelt, and it’s weak now.
Yes hyper fixate on the meme reference rather than the actual argument that sits below it. Does it ever get tiresome to actively look for things to be pretend upset about?
Just in case: https://web.archive.org/web/20081208150839/https://www.globalnerdy.com/2008/09/30/old-man-yells-at-cloud/
Yeah like I’m a lot cooler on the AI hype than most but the articles argument is weak. This is the same shit people were saying when SO and Google were gaining traction. Surprisingly having one tool does not limit people from digging further into internals
The article is written by ai.
You’re getting downvoted because you’re right and people don’t like that :)
They’re getting downvoted because they’re missing the point. It’s not about whether or not I can choose to do things the way I prefer. It’s about how newcomers exposure, and thus opportunity to get into these things, is limited. The arguments about cars or calculators don’t hold up for that exact reason: The existence of cars and calculators does not severely limit people’s exposure to the experience of walking or doing arithmetic.
He is right, but most will choose convenience. And I do believe that people in the future will suffer for it. The brain is like a muscle; you have to use it to keep your mind sharp. I fear that in the future will lack critical thinking or frustration tolerance because AI makes it so easy.
Look we can make the same argument for all tech. I’m sure someone said the same thing about numbers when the abacus was invented, and then the same thing when the first calculators came out.
The existence of cars has not stopped people from running, because they realize that running is not only pleasurable but also necessary for our health.
As always the complacent masses will let their natural abilities atrophy and let tech take care of it. It doesn’t matter, they were never going to be better anyways because that would have required effort. Those who have the drive, curiosity and desire will still choose to do things the painstaking way, just like there’s people out there that choose to interact with their OS using the command line only in 2025 when GUIs exist and are less painful to use.
A common, recurrent experience for me 🤷🏽♂️
I’m more and more distancing myself with computers, it already was “use this library”, then use this app, now it seems just ask the “AI”.
I took up painting and chess, viable replacements I hope.
I want to do this, too, but computers is how I earn money.
Yeah same here, I’m working on a “work less, spend less” lifestyle but it’s quite hard for some resaon to convince people to hire you at less than at full time. Personally I think I’d do the same job, or better, in 4 days. 3 days would yield less total work but more per day.
🤷🏼♀️
Healthcare is, sadly, tied to employment here in the US. That’s why the distinction between “full-time” and “part-time.”
I cannot go part time for that reason (even if it were an option in our industry to begin with).
I’d much rather be able to scale up and down my work hours, as needed (given life circumstances, current money needs, energy levels, etc.). But that’s a pipe dream.
Go freelance.
Well careful though you might end up like me: work more earn less.
It won’t be for long after Great Depression 2 hits :(
That will happen to most “artforms” or jobs that require research. I notice that on myself as well. I now ask an AI for regex stringsor when I want to implement a function I’m unsure about, I ask an AI to see what they are doing first. Critical thinking is still involved, but less than it used to.
Critical thinking is still involved, but less than it used to.
Well at least you are honest about it lol
Article was ai written. Like all of it. ChatGPT speaks a way and this is it.
This is just obviously not the case to anyone who bothers reading it. It’s an original piece of writing.
The only thing that could hint at AI here is the use of em-dashes, which is a bullshit tell—I use them all the time myself as well. They’re right there for anyone with a compose key on Linux.
I’ve noticed people cite em-dashes as concrete proof that something is ai generated, but I’ve seen them be inserted/auto corrected by word plenty of times.
I didn’t know they were illegal to use as a human. I use them often to tack on a related sentence fragment when a technical description is getting too long for the common smartphone user - at least, what I perceive to be too long
Good writers use em-dashes with care and intent. They’re a tool like everything else, and they abound in literature. That said, LLMs do tend to use it every time and everywhere.
AI is the best thing that happened to us for ages: now we can do whatever we do without the pain and humiliation of spending enormous amount of time seeking through some shitty documentation or, in too many cases, straightforwardly bruteforcing the libs by guessing what the fuck parameters this or that function needs.
Now I can just ask an AI if there is a method in this class that does something I need and receive a useful answer, not a RTFM like in the times you’re so fond of.
Right it can totally do that safely and axcurately despite not being able to count the Rs in strawberry.
So if library users stop communicating with each other and with the library authors, how are library authors gonna know what to do next? Unless you want them to talk to AIs instead of people, too.
At some point, when we’ve disconnected every human from each other, will we wonder why? Or will we be content with the answer “efficiency”?
Yes, as long as the information you get from the AI is correct. Which we know is absolutely not the case. That is the issue. If AI’s output could be trusted 100% things would be wildly different.
Unlike vibe coding, asking an LLM how to access some specific thing in a library when you’re not even sure what to look for is a legitimate use case.
Until it gives you a list of books and two thirds don’t exist and the rest aren’t even in the library.
The worst I’ve got so far hasn’t been hallucinated “books”, but stuff like functions from a previous major version of the api mixed in.
I’m most of the time on the opposite side of the AI arguments, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to use an LLM as a documentation search engine. The article itself also points out copilot’s usefulness for similar things, but seems the opinion lost the popular vote here.
You’re not wrong, but my personal experience is that it can also lead you down in a pretty convincing but totally wrong direction. I’m not a professional coder, but have at least some experience and I’ve tried the LLM approach on trying to figure out which library/command set/whatever I should use for problem at hand. Sometimes it gives useful answers, sometimes it’s totally wrong which is easy to spot and at worst it gives you something which (at least to me) seems like it could work. And on the last case I then spend more or less time figuring out how to use the thing it proposed, fail, eventually read the actual old fashioned documentation and notice that the proposed solution is somewhat related to my problem but totally wrong.
And on that point I would have actually saved time if I did things the old fashion way (which is getting more and more annoying as search engines get worse and worse). There’s legitimate use cases too of course, but you really need to have at least some idea on what you’re doing to evaluate the answers LLMs give you.
Yeah, I guess that can happen. For me, it has saved much more time than it has wasted, but I’ve only used it on relatively popular libraries with stable apis, and don’t ask for complex things.
I’ve had great success with using ChatGPT to diagnose and solve hardware issues. There’s plenty of legitimate use cases. The problem remains that if you ask it for information about something, the only way to be sure it’s correct is to actually know what you’re asking about. Anyone without at least passing knowledge of the subject will assume the info they get is correct, which will be the case most of the time, but not always. And in fields like security or medicine, such a small issue could easily have dire ramifications.
If you don’t know what the code does, you’re vibe coding. The point is to not waste time searching. Obviously you’re supposed to check the docs yourself, but that’s much less tedious and time consuming than finding it, if the docs are hard to navigate.
I’d say both is true. If I need a quick meal I’m glad I can just order something ready-made, but I also enjoy to cook an intricate meal for hours. OP is maybe worried that people forget about the latter and only prefer the ready-made solution.
I think chapter 2 does a good job presenting the advantages.
Maybe you inherited someone else’s codebase. A minefield of nested closures, half-commented hacks, and variable names like d and foo. A mess of complex OOPisms, where you have to traverse 18 files just to follow a single behaviour. You don’t have all day. You need a flyover—an aerial view of the warzone before you land and start disarming traps.
Ask Copilot: “What’s this code doing?” It won’t be poetry. It won’t necessarily provide a full picture. But it’ll be close enough to orient yourself before diving into the guts.
So—props where props are due. Copilot is like a greasy, high-functioning but practically poor intern:
- Great with syntax
- Surprisingly quick at listing out your blind spots.
- Good at building scaffolding if you feed it the exact right words.
- Horrible at nuance.
- Useless without supervision.
- Will absolutely kill you in production if left alone for 30 seconds.
That was why it was so entertaining, getting a lil homebrew to run on the Nintendo DS was fun.
