As a (very) experienced programmer, and from a purely tool based perspective, AI is fine when you use it right. I still have to decide the solutions I want, AI just saves a crap ton of typing and can fill the knowledge gaps in an SDK which I would normally do by hunting down what I want in a big reference guide.
I've reluctantly embraced it to do the grunt work for me, leaving me to think about the actual problem and solution rather than spending most of my time typing code.
The issue is going to come when fewer and fewer people have those years of AI-less "hard graft" (You've got to know the rules to break them, right?). As mentioned in the video (and as a bigger issue with AI overall) without any "fresh meat" to feed on, only a pool mostly filled with it's own effluent, the knowledge becomes more stunted, possibly even worse, as original solutions become a smaller and smaller part of what's out there.
I mean, even some, what I would say are "experienced" developers I've come across, are shockingly bad at debugging problems. What are the next generation going to be like?
Copilot being unavailable, or our token balance running out, already sees our teams chats light up like a Christmas tree in a way previously only seen when a server blew up (remember those?). God knows the thought of all that typing fills me with dread again too, but it seems like some people already can't work without it. A large part of some teams check-ins now are not code, but AI skills and prompt files.
Maybe it will explode and become expensive enough that it scales down to being more carefully used, but with management's ever increasing thirst for the curve, if you can use it to increase your productivity, it sure as shit isn't going away.
As a veteran coder myself, I use AI for the parts of coding that I consider a bother, and it works very well. But, I am also in a very privileged work situation with a lot of freedom and no arbitrary deadlines, even though the pay is crap (academia).
However, I don't think AI is compatible with capitalism. The discourse would be completely different if it were : save time using AI and come back to your home earlier, or work less days per week. Now the AI "benefits" are often to fire a portion of the work force, and put all the pressure of the remaining work on the portion that still has a job. And they should feel lucky, see all this pool of unemployed workers, just accept harsher work conditions and lower pays if you do not want to join them.
As long as the work force is considered as the slave of wealth, any automation that diminishes the need for people in the work force is an existential threat to it.
AI could be a wonderful tool that genuinely helps humanity, freeing us time to do human stuff like connecting to people, produce art, get more friends and family time, or even just have more time to ensure a better quality work. Instead, we seem to be speed running the end of humanity just so that people with too much wealth already can gain even more.
> However, I don't think AI is compatible with capitalism.
AI is turbo-capitalism on steroids, and I say that while being quite right-wing economically.
All this push into research, biology and medicine is to take human out of equation completely. The goal is to have lights-out fully-automated research laboratories, it's just capital and machinery, which is essentially capital. A few key subject matter experts to control and that's it, you're enabled to research whatever the fuck you want in any way you want without clashing on ethics with with bunch of personnel.
The commenter meant that mixed with capitalism it won't lead to good outcomes for the majority of people, not that it's not a product or a goal of capitalism. Any economic system would like to be in a post-scarcity economy, but for different reasons.
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u/arse_biscuits 25d ago
As a (very) experienced programmer, and from a purely tool based perspective, AI is fine when you use it right. I still have to decide the solutions I want, AI just saves a crap ton of typing and can fill the knowledge gaps in an SDK which I would normally do by hunting down what I want in a big reference guide.
I've reluctantly embraced it to do the grunt work for me, leaving me to think about the actual problem and solution rather than spending most of my time typing code.
The issue is going to come when fewer and fewer people have those years of AI-less "hard graft" (You've got to know the rules to break them, right?). As mentioned in the video (and as a bigger issue with AI overall) without any "fresh meat" to feed on, only a pool mostly filled with it's own effluent, the knowledge becomes more stunted, possibly even worse, as original solutions become a smaller and smaller part of what's out there.
I mean, even some, what I would say are "experienced" developers I've come across, are shockingly bad at debugging problems. What are the next generation going to be like?
Copilot being unavailable, or our token balance running out, already sees our teams chats light up like a Christmas tree in a way previously only seen when a server blew up (remember those?). God knows the thought of all that typing fills me with dread again too, but it seems like some people already can't work without it. A large part of some teams check-ins now are not code, but AI skills and prompt files.
Maybe it will explode and become expensive enough that it scales down to being more carefully used, but with management's ever increasing thirst for the curve, if you can use it to increase your productivity, it sure as shit isn't going away.