I wasn't gesturing to the energy/environmental impacts of AI.
2,089 karma · joined June 28, 2021
> Claude and GPT regularly write programs that are way better than what I would’ve written
What you're describing doesn't sound "way better" than what you would have written by hand, except possibly in terms of the speed that it was written.
No one is going to care about anyone’s painstaking avoidance of chlorofluorocarbons if it takes ten times as long to style your hair with imperceptibly less ozone hole damage.
This is gaslighting. We're only a few years into coding agents being a thing. Look at the history of human innovation and tell me that I'm unreasonable for suspecting that there is an iceberg worth of unmitigated externalities lurking beneath the surface that haven't yet been brought to light. In time they might. Like PFAS, ozone holes, global warming.
Is that really true? Like, if you took the time to plan it carefully, dot every i, cross every t?
The way I think of LLM's is as "median targeters" -- they reliably produce output at the centre of the bell curve from their training set. So if you're working in a language that you're unfamiliar with -- let's say I wanted to make a todo list in COBOL -- then LLM's can be a great help, because the median COBOL developer is better than I am. But for languages I'm actually versed in, the median is significantly worse than what I could produce.
So when I hear people say things like "the clanker produces better programs than me", what I hear is that you're worse than the median developer at producing programs by hand.
Having premarital sex is not everyone's definition of "promiscuous".
There's an argument that even under capitalism, a lot of jobs still only exist in order to keep people busy.
In reality everyone who's thinking about having kids exists on a spectrum of what's possible: either it's going to be really easy for you (because you're Elon Musk and you don't give a fuck) or it's going to be borderline impossible (because you're infertile, or you're broke, or whatever).
Just because someone looked at the odds and said "you know what, maybe this isn't a great idea" doesn't make them selfish. Meanwhile you're the one imposing your worldview on them...
Must be nice. Claude and Codex are still a waste of my time in complex legacy codebases.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/business/energy-environme...
Sometimes.
You lost me here. Come back when you're proud of it.
This sounds fucking awesome.
- McCabe (Kurt Russell), Vanilla Sky
- 'Microservices' sketch by Krazam
My name isn't Russ. Russ Ackoff was a business process optimization leader from the last century -- a contemporary of Deming and the Toyota school etc.
AI won't take a shoddy process (say, your process for reviewing and accepting forms from patients) and magically make it better if you don't have an idea of what "better" actually entails.
"Improving a system requires knowing what you would do if you could do exactly what you wanted to. Because if you don't know what you would do if you could do exactly what you wanted to, how on earth are you going to know what you can do under constraints?"
- Russ Ackoff
Learned a new word, thank you!