AI is here and it trivializes what used to be hard. Developing software used to require feats of skill and endurance, and we're used to judging software based on that. Now it doesn't.
We will have to get used to judging software based on the output not on the input. Whether what was made is unique, interesting, creative, not whether it took a lot of time or knowledge.
There is no going back, only forward.
I was trained as an animator at one point. The process was to do the storyboards, layout, key drawings, map out the timings, slug out the dialog, and then send it off to a company in Korea that would in-between and produce the final product.
That Korean studio has been replaced by a machine. Fiscally, that is unpleasant for those animators, but they're really talented and now they can also hire such a machine to implement their ideas if they want to.
Disney was doing this in 1930. In-betweeners and the ink-and-paint girls were the machine. Nasa was doing it in the late 40's. Women were the computers.
Putting software into those roles loses us nothing that is human. As you say, all that matters is the output, not the input.
And if you want to do a project where you think the input is what will impress somebody, because you manually assembled 50k bottlecaps, that's still an available form. Sometimes that works and people care a little more because it was done directly.
All of this sort of already happened, dozens of times. Socks, knives, screws, engines, a million different things that used to be about mastery and are now about understanding.
Understanding is hard. Making that the requirement leaves a bunch of people behind. We're going to have to figure out how to support them, we can't keep having a society that depends on the moral value of work when work is unavailable, but as you say, there is no going back.
We never had a situation where we could outsource unique problem solving at all levels.
You say "Putting software into those roles loses us nothing that is human." but you can have LLM produce design at all levels. I can't think of anything LLM cannot replace humans with, except maybe physical labor, which requires good robotics precision, that we haven't perfected yet.
The main part that's missing however, is that the nature of linguistics (and the core to LLMs' success) is that LLMs are wiring together useful concepts that humans spent thousands of years polishing and relating to one another in speech.
Language has been the code behind all human thought, understanding, emotions, and innovation. It's what enables LLMs to work. LLMs don't _understand_ words, they connect them together usefully, which works because humans mapped useful composable words to useful composable concepts.
And if you think about how human thinking and consciousness is often attributed to language in the first place (not clear if we even would be conscious without language), a lot of human is being delegated.
I'm not sure what to do about it, but I find your kind of explanation incredibly reductive.
Have you ever read "Stranger in a Strange Land"?
The character of Jubal Harshaw is instructive. He's become very rich because he can just unhook his brain and produce a tear-jerking and profitable story in a few seconds as he lounges around his pool.
He gives his secretaries the gist of the story, they fill it out, they arrange for somebody to make the film.
The point of the character is that what he's doing takes no emotional effort or insight. He's writing Hallmark movies. Everybody who's working for him adds nothing to it.
And we have Hallmark/Lifetime movies already. People were making them for decades before the LLMs came along.
But if you could send an LLM back to 1950 and train it on the pre-existing literature, you couldn't have it generate The Shining, A Scanner Darkly, Piranesi, Perdido Street Station, The April Witch, or Starship Troopers.
-none of the research indicates a mechanism by which you can create a selfhood that gets banged around by time and has feelings about itself, but admittedly, that might change
-even if you could do such a thing, you can't then put the robot in a human body and let it nurse and get potty trained and sent to pre-school and bullied and wonder about its mortality as it starts to think about what its career might be, etc etc etc
We were already making slop, because we already had a big production machine that transforms any input into a "movie" or "a television show", and a lot of the inputs were garbage.
The movie "A Talking Cat?" exists and predates AI by about ten years.
The point is that we were already delegating this stuff to human beings who didn't care about it and weren't bringing their humanity to it. Nothing changes on that side of things except that they don't have jobs to show up to.
So, at least for now, this isn't very different from the previous way of doing things, except that it's cheap enough that some people are spending a few thousand dollars to say "make me a story about a sad orphan" and the machine rips off Charles Dickens and Horatio Alger to make a thing nobody wants to watch without paying a bunch of key grips and best boys and caterers.
Why? I don't see a clear reason why it couldn't that does not invoke the mystical "human spirit".
To be clear, I don't expect a single LLM to create such a book, at least not in anything resembling current models, but I can absolutely imagine a long multi-agent setup that would. Given enough money, I'd set up a mechanism whereby author AIs generate books, separate agents act as editors and critics to iterate on a small fraction of the best of these drafts to polish them, and then publisher AIs choose an even more minute fraction of these to publish into "the zeitgeist", which will then have other agents offer further commentary on these books, which would then feed into the context (or even fine-tuning/training) of the next generation of LLMs. I expect that a sequence of e.g. ten generations of swarms of AIs, each perhaps of ten thousand agents, could arrive at a ground-breaking book with actual literary merit.
Give me the budget to prove me wrong :)
In my company I have a very good conversational dynamic with my team. So in my first forays into LLM usage (the past couple years), I began trying to designate models as team members and mimic similar conversations and decision making processes that we have at work, just as an experiment. Somebody to brainstorm together who likes going on tangents, somebody who unapologetically removes unnecessary cruft and cuts scope, a few other people with specific tendencies and personalities.
The results were completely awful. LLMs couldn't even remotely mimic these personalities. The conversation was all trying to please no matter how contentious I tried to instruct them to be. LLMs just seem to struggle a lot with arguing and being contentious. Which probably makes sense based on training.
I feel like these types of factories in practice don't work out too well.
Yet.
That is very interesting and well worded, I use Agents all day so I kind of wish to an extent that they would be almighty, and maybe they will be. But using them so much there is clearly a gap, they actually became worse at writing.
I think, unfortunately to some, LLMS are like perfect operators, great at math and coding, executing on whatever you want, but they do lack some "pseudo creative" ability we might not have a word for. Fable 5.1 genuinely writes poorly. Correctly, but poorly. And as you said, writing codes human thought, well maybe not all of it.
This isn't ideological Milton Friedman free markets rahrah. I just can't imagine the alternative in practice: what if mainframe operators decided to opposed destruction, which would prevent mini and personal computers from becoming a reality?
This is awfully simplistic. Even in 2026, the act of writing, whether code or prose, is thinking.
why? you skipped over justifying this statement. especially in an artistic context.
This has really emphasized the difference between developing software and building a business.
Developers everywhere are now doing side projects and developing software that would have taken 10 person-years in 2022. They’re discovering the hard way that software alone does not create a business product that customers might pay for.
Developing software is cheap now, but creating a business remains hard. All of the attempts I’ve seen to use AI to develop and grow a business have only turned real customers away.
This has been the case for far longer than AI has been a consideration. We all know that counting lines of code isn't a mark of quality, and yet we venerate those that put in all the hours to get something done.
I would say you need to go a step farther than that. The output needs to be impactful. Increased MAU (or GH stars, downloads, etc.), lowered support load, lower ops costs, whatever it might be.
Nothing is inevitable. Humans strive to shape the future they want to live in.
Or, I don't understand what you are suggesting we strive for? The whole post-enlightenment vibe has been to use the scientific method to reduce human toil and increase human flourishing.
It's a fact that the process of developing software has been significantly reduced in friction and difficulty and that the experience and skill required has been greatly lowered.
What used to be a skilled trade is now more or less an unskilled trade.
We should celebrate this. It means we'll get more software for less time and energy.
LLMs run the risk of eliminating these insights and freezing software development at its current level of complexity forever. Few good technical ideas come from management, and in this LLM-first world, that's all "programmers" really are anymore.
(And that's without even addressing the horrific externalities of LLM use, such as slopificaion of every public internet community and entrenchment of the oligarchy at the expense of workers.)
Just like nobody is shoeing horses, or doing wood shop in high school, or binding books, or sharpening arrowheads, or all the other things that we used to do that we don't do anymore and spend zero time thinking about. And we still have insights, some might argue with all this toil that we no longer have to do, we have more insights!
I also liked writing the code, just like I'm sure the woodworkers liked making the furniture by hand. But technology and culture move forward anyways.
These still require skill and endurance to do well.
Vibe-coded projects always are clear as such, no matter how slick they look.
> Whether what was made is unique, interesting, creative
Not this.
That is not what technology is for.
If you want unique, interesting and creative - you can have it anytime, just like our ancestors living in a cave or a jungle.
Technology is for something else. You can scratch your head with a hammer - that is not what a hammer is for.
A toilet is not made for art.
Please copy paste this exchange into any freely available LLM to help explain the point I'm making that you are unable to grasp.
ps. I have no trouble comprehending your banal truism - anything can be called anything by anybody at any time, including we, art and the word for.
I assume you might associate technology with a more utilitarian perspective, but that's just not descriptive of what humans actually do.
Whatever technology becomes the next revolution (hoping it's not sticks and stones) will be used by humans (hoping they exist) to make art as well.
No.
Is a screwdriver for hammering nails? Is a hammer for screwing screws?
Do you have difficulty drawing a hard distinction there too?
Art tends to happen with whatever technology is available, whether it's sticks and mud or nanometer-scale transistors.
Similar to all other crafts after industrial revolution. This of course will only be viable for a small and niche portion of software market.
Would you define everyone involved as "disliking" new technology? Or would you define them as having a "like" for old technology? I think the same question could be considered for communities which continue to enjoy hand programming.
(when I say "value" I'm not talking about making money. Retro hardware generally does not make any money, but it is obviously valuable to those who enjoy it. Someone who hates modern technology might prefer to work with that, but that's not a requirement nor the focus of the community. If instead you have a community which is defined by hating modern technology, what I'm saying is that that is probably more harmful to the people within it than helpful. These kinds of spaces can become _very_ bad for the mental health of those within them.)
Like for example yeah frontier labs are stomping into venerable domains with no respect for their history or culture, and spending billions of dollars crushing worker power. Both projects the tech industry has been deeply invested in for over a decade and I don't remember anything like this backlash to it then so maybe the attitudes aren't the problem exactly?
There are also people conscientiously using LLMs to improve their stances on security and accessibility that would otherwise be outside their budget.
I can think of some other attitudes too. What were you thinking of?
I think this will always be the front line of competition.
Who has unique knowledge (dare I add taste?!), and is willing/able to give a project the most focus and time?