Opus 5.5 causing an identity crisis is real
kondz.io
kondz.io
waste of time.
Yes, it's funny to see programmers of all people, uber-technologists, shoot "i'm walking around in the woods videos" decrying the end of human civilisation merely because one specific craft practice is being automated.
AI isnt taking 'human creativity' away, this is an incredibly parochial and self-interested take. Its taking human creativity, as expressed in certain 20th C. crafts, away. Just as textile art has gone, and we don't have lace everywhere any more -- so it goes, that handcrafted programming goes to.
Engineers are those people who do that to human civilisation. That's always been the job. Replace people with machines. So it goes.
They were always a bit resentful about how I made money "so easily". And they were right in a sense. Before retiring I'd make more money browsing reddit in a boring meeting than they would make in a day.
We made incredible improvements to society but we also destroyed the livelihoods of millions. I believe our profession was/is a massive net positive to the world, but many got hurt while we steamrolled others without hesitation.
I'm actually very positive about AI in general and I don't think it will end our field. But if that's what happens, we can lament the bad luck but not really complain that we've been wronged.
Its not yet clear to me that blacksmith software engineers that quickly learn DIY tools, arent going to be in greater demand. Nor even, capable of commanding higher salaries. Perhaps fewer will exist, but they will transact with more end customers because their rate of production will increase -- and so, be richer still.
Its my view, incidentlly, that far fewer programmers ought exist. If you think about the last decade or two of the industry, and the rise of massive low-quality bootcamps -- imv we had an seng bubble. It isnt clear to me that we arent lower than a pre-bubble baseline.
And it has rolled out to the rest of the software engineering industry rapidly because a) it was adjacent to AI development, and b) software engineers are very expensive workers. Graphical design is also being hit due to its proximity to software engineering.
Other information workers are going to start feeling the hurt soon enough, but their respective industry timeline will be correlated with how much money it's going to save to replace them.
Paralegals, customer support, copywriters, data analysts, and any other fields that are purely informational are all going to feel the squeeze.
Its unclear what other jobs have a billion experts to-hand to grade LLM outputs. Its also unclear what other jobs would even benefit from such a thing.
For most others, it seems LLMs are basically tutors and mentors which existed anyway.
The only themes that rhyme imo are the loss of power to a smaller subset of humans (owners) and technological advancement enabling us to produce more (not necessarily better quality) with smaller costs. But people think that the history will repeat itself, and Jevons paradox will hold true, because it held in the Industrial Revolution; quote from the article: "Eventually, everything should be fine. The technology will be more powerful, and the job will still be there, it’ll just look different."
In this revolution, what if instead of being the human that invented the steam engine, we are the horses? "What happened to all the horses replaced by machines after industrialization? Humans keep a few around for entertainment but that’s about it." [1]
Creating something visually interesting Invisible-Cities-ish is basically a task with a billion or more satisfactory outcomes. You don't have a precise view on what makes an invisible city a good one as long as it has all the fancy looking bells and whistles. This means the AI can generate a bunch of tokens which as long as they technically work (which it seems the max-thinking did not fully) produce a "good" result. This makes you think - wow AI is impressive. However if many things in the system really mattered, it might have been much less successful as the AI may have made poor assumptions. This was basically a task that given a large volume of tokens and technical competence it's fairly easy for the AI to do a good job at because we don't evaluate it with any depth/precision. I think the same is true for music, where there are basically an infinite number of combinations of sounds, beats, melodies, etc. which are pleasant to hear - and songs aren't mission critical - so alignment is not a big issue. Generative AI is good at these tasks.
I’m not sure how this causes an identity crisis. But if my purpose in life was to churn out random stuff that wasn’t meaningful to people, I would assume that I would be crisising much earlier than now.
It doesn't - author outright states his title and premise were complete clickbait.
I’ve been coding since I was 6. In my 40s now. Making stuff. Making stuff in meatspace, too.
I always told myself that I enjoyed coding, that I enjoyed making stuff.
I was wrong. I hate coding. I hate standing in a ditch with heavy cables slung over me. I hate neck and eye strain from hours bent over a soldering iron.
What I like, what drives me - the outcomes. The neat bit of software that I conceptualised and now have in my hands. The mad Heath Robinson contraption that somehow makes the machine that goes “ping!”, in fact, go ping.
I’ve always recognised that I am a lazy asshole - but there has always been a carve-out for creating - yet the giant heap of unfinished projects tells me my “eh, amanhã” attitude does in fact persist throughout many avenues of my life, even those I thought I enjoyed.
Me, I fucking love vibe coding. I get to go to bed at a sensible hour, and wake up in the morning like it’s bloody Christmas Day, as I know there’s going to be something cracking to play with. The ideas I have, realised, without me having to slog through the weeds. Nobody sucking their teeth at the scope. No “madaxe got distracted by another shiny object”.
I’ve executed on basically every digital must and should that I’ve come up with over the last decade, in the last nine months. I’m now onto the “could haves” and “would like to haves”.
And… I’ll be honest. Maintainability, understanding what it does under the hood - for the first time in my life I barely care about, as next year I can have a better model do it again, and better.
So, I like the outcome. I like having an idea and seeing it come to life. What happens between A and B isn’t terribly important, as it turns out that not all paths are the goal.
And I think the same may apply to a lot of creative people - I mean, artists had and have artisans for a reason - and now we can all have an ever-improving artisan.
I find other devs/colleagues who don’t have ideas of what to work on a bit hard to understand . Just can’t comprehend how someone won’t have any desire to do nothing else with this tech other than finishing off jira tickets.
And a few of them have expressed to me that whatever I think I enjoy today is only cause I have found “purpose” and soon both what I’m building will be easy for anyone to replicate and thus become worthless, and I won’t be happy then. I have doubts about both.
Most people don't either, and nor do 99% of programmers — hence their bitching that their mechanical transformation of requirements they got fed by someone else into code is now becoming worthless. It was never worth that much to begin with.
I'm very much like the grandparent poster: I love that I can now focus on what actually matters — which features are to be included, which excluded, and how every feature should work w.r.t the all-guiding user experience. All without having to wonder which sorting algorithm will be optimal here or how to wire up a db migration.
Sucks for code monkey ticket pushers though.
And at least right now the thought that somebody will be able to make in a day what’s still gonna take me months or years doesn’t make me unhappy. I just still have doubts if that’ll happen and even more doubtful that this future predicted lack of my purpose will make me unhappy.
Thank God you are not tasked to build actual bridges.
I even recently used AI to do the FEA for a 80m long pedestrian suspension bridge, and to model where to anchor along the span to avoid bounce.
Entirely my own risk, on my own land, and the bridge is sound.
god is this a perfect encapsulation of the jagged nature of LLMs. incredible and kind of broken. for now at least
Rather, I tend to feel that sensation even more now, while LLMs are still in their early stages.
I’m not trying to be snarky. I spent most of my life as an atheist and it never occurred to me to think about the meaning of my existence. It was obvious that I’m just a wet bag of carbon. What else could I be?
I am likewise atheist and I have spent half a decade thinking about meaning. It has nothing to do with religion or God, though some find their meaning there.
I’m not trying to be snarky, but you should read more philosophy. Everybody asks about meaning at one point in their life, and find themselves woefully unprepared.