I perfectly agree with antirez about the importance of AI and the benefit for coders. In the last month we saw a big jump and we all are in the middle of the biggest technological revolution since the internet. He summarised the benefits, but omitted the rest.
Why we don't have to be anti-AI? Why in his opinion is just "HYPE"? I didn't find any answer in his post. He doesn't analyse the cons of AI and explain why some people might be anti-AI. He skipped the hard part and wrote a mild article that re-publish the narrative that is already getting spread on every social media.
Edit for clarification: I don't consider anti-AI the people that think LLMs don't work, they are wrong. I consider anti-AI people that are worried how this technology will impact society in so many ways that are hard to predict, including the future of software engineering.
From purely business and career perspective, being anti-AI will be a self-own unless you work for niche companies that have the anti-AI stance. Yes, they exist. But if a company is building, supporting, or consulting any product, where timing matters and there’s competition (which is super majority), it’ll be in their best interest to nudge their employees to speed up via AI.
I do think at least being proficient right now with the LLMs will help you with whatever comes next, just because you’ll build the intuition around it. Being anti-AI might negatively affect one’s employability, and especially the younger ones who don’t have seniority or connections over the decades.
> From purely business and career perspective, being anti-AI will be a self-own
From purely business and career perspective being anti-blockchain/NFT/online gambling/adtech/fascism (at least for now in US)/etc. is a self-own, too.
I'm sure everybody making a choice against that knows it.
Thankfully purely business and career perspectives don't dictate everything.
There is no hard part. The anti-AI position has simply become trite. The idea is that agentic coding does not work. Today, it does work.
It only works for languages and frameworks that are already in the training data (duh). It still is mostly useless when you need to create something from scratch in an unstable language.
That, and you can’t also get the amazing results if you’re poor or have bad internet.
Good thing almost all of programming falls into the former. Most of the economy runs on well defined languages. Billions and billions of dollars.
Opus 4.5 and update your priors. This was certainly true >6months back and is no longer the case
I read the same exact thing 6 months ago.
We are using the latest stuff. Our experience is still not great.
Why do you guys always assume we don't as though the oldest models are easy to use accidentally
Not true. I built some tools in Hare, which almost certainly isn’t in the training data to any significant extent. It was more work than having it build Go or Rust, but it got it done. It had to curl the docs a fair bit.
That's true for most people too. You are trying too hard.
Some people are also opposed because of the negative externalities when building and running AI systems (environmental consequences, intellectual property theft), even if they understand that agentic coding "works". This is a valid position.
It works for some things, not everything.