One of the cool things about code is that you can build stuff out of thin air, basically for free. It's not like woodworking where you have to pay for the wood.
We are moving into a weird time where people are assuming that now we have to pay machines churn out code.
Somehow they packaged up our own ability to think and are selling it back to us. If they can get us to forget how to do it we'll be the perfect customers, dependent forever.
That’s what I don’t get about this whole AI push. It’s a global rug that everyone plans to pull, it’s sold at cost, it already presents major risks, everyone seems to be aware of all that and yet - the consumers and lawmakers are relatively quiet.
Its happening at a global moment of chaotic behavior. When prices are soaring, information and institutions are disintermediated, jobs are hard to come by and layoffs easy, insurance is tied to your job and your kids' well being to your location -- well, most people get real quiet about stuff.
Even then I think a LOT of people are saying something but the narrative mechanism of inevitability is really strong.
Say all the SOTA (remote) LLMs went away tonight, would programmers everywhere suddenly be giving up on programming? Maybe some, but unlikely that most would. It's not so much of a rug-pull if it's an inconvenience at most when it goes away. Maybe some would take some time to readjust (some days/weeks/months?), but then it'd be back to normal again.
> Say all the SOTA (remote) LLMs went away tonight, would programmers everywhere suddenly be giving up on programming?
That's assuming that the code base in question is still well maintained and designed. If this were to happen I would bet that heavily vibe coded things - like Bun and Claude Code - would pretty much immediately hit a wall, where humans just can't comprehend the accumulated mess well enough to make productive changes.
> would pretty much immediately hit a wall, where humans just can't comprehend the accumulated mess well enough to make productive changes.
Plenty of people spent lots of time of their career essentially cleaning up code and refactoring after others. Yes it'd be a lot, but there are really giant spaghetti's out there that been 100% built by humans, then conquered by refactorers.
Short of outlawing all models, I don’t see a world in which we ever go back to only manual coding.
Who are "we"? Can't go back to what you never left.
I'm not forcing anyone to use tools they don't want. The Amish can continue making their handcrafted furniture, but I'll make sure to work on construction sites that have power tools.
In your mind this sounds like “damn kids, get off my lawn”, and to the kids it sounds like, “I will only ever plow my fields with donkeys, tractors are too complex for something like plowing”.
I'm totally fine with the kids' understanding, for whatever that's worth.
i am still manual coding
not gonna change
still gonna get paid $300k+ for it
No need to outright outlaw models.
Just continue down the path of making it so only the oligarchs can afford to access them, power them, and buy capable hardware to run them locally.
Also helps the oligarchs to have their government assets issue impossible restrictions like “no foreigners can access” that isn’t technically outlawing models for everyone.
> Say all the SOTA (remote) LLMs went away tonight
Most likely that would cause company pulling the rug on their frontier model(s), to fall over themselves. Meanwhile the competition keeps going. Hence no top AI player does that unless forced to.
have you heard of the word Psychosis?
Personally, I think when theres this much money involved the psychosis would only intensify.
I wonder how much money is actually involved?
idiocracy in progress
You can only build it for free if you don't value your time. That is good for personal projects and hobbies but which company can build stuff without costs? There was always an expense to generating code. Plus you have to pay for equipment, electricity, subscriptions to stuff for their staff etc.
I don't really think they are packaging up ability to think abd selling it back to you. There is nothing stopping you from not using AI and even companies, many firms just dont trust AI and don't use it.
But the idea that code could be built of thin air is not true in case of actual businesses.
I really dislike it but the effectiveness of code generation is just too good now. I really doubted it at first but I can churn out 10x the work. Is it the same quality as IC? no but I think that it doesn't matter anymore. How many of us have worked on some 10+m loc monstrosity for years never knowing more than 1% of the codebase? Probably most. Now I can generate that same monstrosity on my own. I've created a 1.1m+ loc and growing trading platform that automates options trades based on live ML edges from research papers. I never would have been able to do that on my own before LLM's. It has full telemetry and comprehensive error logging and testing as well. I'd have been strained to get MVP done before LLMs.
I don't think someone without coding experience can do it though. I've accepted that the new expected output for a single dev will eventually converge to 10x-100x what it is now.
> Now I can generate that same monstrosity on my own.
For what? Why would you need to?
> I've created a 1.1m+ loc and growing trading platform that automates options trades based on live ML edges from research papers.
Sounds like a lot of "if/else" /j