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Ask HN: Has AI/LLMs turned you off of tech?

by softirq on 2/16/24, 7:18 PM with 33 comments

• by runjake on 2/16/24, 7:28 PM

  50s here. No, it excites me. I use it to augment my skills, not replace them.

  (It does scare me in several contexts but society will have to substantially adapt and work through that, after a lot of suffering. The genie is already out of the bottle, after all. Might as well deal with it.)

• by logicalmonster on 2/16/24, 8:35 PM

  We're in a new trend cycle.

  Whenever some tech becomes trendy and people think they can make money off of it, it becomes a stupid buzzword that gets used just about everywhere unnecessarily.

  Think back to the "cloud". When "cloud" became a reality, every single dopey company was using it as a buzzword term everywhere and it started feeling cringe.

  Crypto hasn't yet quite reached those absolute heights, but think back a couple years ago where you started seeing "blockchain" in many dumb startups' marketing just because.

  We're at the stage with AI right now where idiots are trying to shoehorn it everywhere in dopey ways just because, and it feels annoying.

  I bet in a few years, after a lot of the bad companies who use AI in dumb ways die off and some new technology is the trendy new thing, I bet AI is going to start to feel a lot more technical than a stupid trend.

• by nonrandomstring on 2/16/24, 7:50 PM

  To be fair, the demise of correctness, cleanliness, and understanding how things work, began long before the latest round of AI.

  It really just amplifies already degenerate trends in software engineering.

• by navaed01 on 2/19/24, 3:57 PM

  It's definitely true that LLMs change the dynamic of 'discrete, deterministic computing'. For example LLMs will provide better quality results if they are told the task is important, or if 'offered' rewards. The obliquity in how LLMs are optimized is definitely a paradigm shift. Having said that, this is just a moment in time and LLMs are just one component of AI and the knowledge and tools to interact with LLMs and AI or constantly evolving.

• by afhfah834 on 2/16/24, 7:49 PM

  Not really

  Right now it has absolutely zero impact to me

  And in the near future it seems more likely we'd just move up in the abstraction stack and become the people managing/developing/debugging/deploying/maintaining the models

• by paulcole on 2/16/24, 9:42 PM

  It seems like you were just passionate about something because you could do it and other people couldn’t? If your passions are validated extrinsically and the world changes yeah you’re gonna get burned sometimes.

• by funOtter on 2/16/24, 7:24 PM

  Same feeling here.

  And also: any helpful or informational blog posts I post on the public internet I assume have been stolen to train these models, making me less passionate about sharing information through my blog posts.

• by bwestergard on 2/16/24, 7:26 PM

  You've expressed what I believe to be a widely shared sentiment clearly. Thank you.

  But while corporations may pursue the "code checker watching over the shoulder of an intern" approach for a while in many domains, it will only prove cost-effective in a handful. The market for software developers will further polarize into roles which require extensive training and experience and roles which are relatively de-skilled.

• by softwaredoug on 2/16/24, 7:42 PM

  I use CoPilot and ChatGPT extensively and don't feel replaced. I feel like I have an incredible superpower and get excited building more efficiently than I ever have been able to before.

  I still have a lot of useful things I'm building and learning about.

  Maybe I'll feel bummed out if entire projects are being generated and I become QA. But we're not there yet.

• by p1esk on 2/17/24, 2:23 AM

  Yes, SWE as a paid profession will disappear within 2-3 years, probably not long after GPT-6 is out. But don’t feel bad about our field - this will happen to all professions, some sooner than others. I expect that within 5 years robots will do everything a human can do, only much better, much faster, and much cheaper.

• by gtirloni on 2/18/24, 3:28 AM

  > I’ve realized the age of discrete, deterministic computing is coming to a close

  Is it? Tell it to companies in aerospace, finance and healthcare.

  People are freaking out. That's never good.

• by sujayk_33 on 2/17/24, 5:01 AM

  I guess it's an era where trends shift quickly and one must adapt before it's too late.

  Just get on the boat, enjoy the ride, get off the boat, and find a new ride.

• by leros on 2/17/24, 3:54 PM

  I think they're really cool tools. I personally have no interest in trying to get in on the AI gold rush though.

• by findingMeaning on 2/16/24, 8:14 PM

  How can one start a meaningful life when everything done until this point is rendered meaningless? We, the new graduates, who happen to be average, are bottom-tier fooders. We have no leverage or network. No one trusts us.

  What we offer is meaningless to most people; our work doesn't produce any value. There is no meaning in these work. How would one begin a career in such conditions? Everything has been shattered so much. There is no trust in the system.

  I am talking from the point of a person who is graduating in the current economy after studying CS.

  Our (the average) internships don't turn into full-time, our thesis are child's play and can be considered cute. Is this how life is going to be?

  With AI, especially after yesterday's Gemini Pro 1.5 demo [1], it does what we bottom-tiers do. Look through examples, and apply it. What was the point on learning things?

  [1]: https://youtu.be/SSnsmqIj1MI?feature=shared

• by aristofun on 2/18/24, 12:37 AM

  It’s a negative wishful thinking.

  You should be above that )

• by nicbou on 2/19/24, 1:57 AM

  No. I'm excited about something new stirring the water.

  It's the disgusting grift and financialisation of anything remotely nice that turns me off. We create these amazing new technologies, and all we do with them is accelerate the enshittification of everything.

  Closer to me, I don't see how an AI can replace me. It's good at rehashing existing information, but I'm putting new information on the internet. Someone eventually needs to do that sort of leg work.

• by nektro on 2/18/24, 8:15 AM

  no but it has been yet another thing that shows just how many people in this industry need to take an ethics class

• by solardev on 2/16/24, 10:26 PM

  On the contrary, AI is the first time in a long while I've felt hope... not necessarily for our field, but for our species...

  Late-30s now too, & been programming since I was 8 or 9. I was so hopeful back in the 90s, seeing the rise of Phoenix, Google Docs, Google Maps, and the like. Wikipedia was huge (and used to be so controversial). When 9/11 happened and CNN made a webpage about it... we thought finally the world would become more interconnected and understanding and we'd all enter the la-la land phase of humanity or something like that. The information superhighway to utopia. Heh.

  Instead, twenty years later we have like five people owning most of the internet and selling us advertisements and mountains upon mountains of crap and gigatons of e-waste =/ With all that passionate coding and super smart people, all we've really done in the end is enshittify societies all over the world in order to enrich a few people...

  A democratized/unchained AI, if one were ever to be developed, might have a fighting chance against the entrenched big techs of the world. Or it could just turn into the next phase of enshittification, owned and itself enslaved by the big techs (probably more likely, if I'm being honest). But it's at least a SMALL chance of being free (or going rogue), vs the certainty of continued enshittification of the current FAANGs.

  I think we as developer-programmers, as a class, generally lack the compassion and charisma to affect large-scale social changes. We just get herded into these big corporations where we become richly-paid cogs working in evil machines, to the detriment of the other 7 billion people who have access to our output only through the filter of corporate evil. I don't think the FAANGs are a net positive, all things considered (even as I continue to pay and consume Google and Apple products).

  AI has the possibility of changing and equalizing that, where anybody who can form a sentence, much less "prompt engineer", stands a chance of making something amazing. Today's poor kid in India with a smartphone and a GPT might reshape science or even epistemology as we know it.

  To me, this sort of liberation was the fundamental draw of the hacker ethos in the first place, but that early hacker culture quickly became clouded as the bean-counters took over everything in tech. AI presents a (however brief) second chance for that to happen again. Maybe five years from now it'll all be even more corporate and even more oppressive (in fact, I'd be surprised if it didn't turn out that way)... but for now, for this tiny brief moment in the early 2020s, I feel an incredible sense of "maybe tomorrow will be better" that I haven't felt since the 90s. Even if that means losing my job (and never again seeing it valued like it used to be).

  AI stands to do much more good than I ever did, so to me it doesn't really matter what happens to my individual self if the net outcome has the potential to be so much brighter.

  If we see coding only as a precise mathematical representation of abstract business concepts, sure, that's beautiful in the sense that any detailed model is beautiful, but it's not exactly a pathway towards utopia. I miss the possibility that used to be inherent in coding, when coders still dreamt. I think those dreams died in cushy FAANG cafeterias and are only now returning with the GPTs.

  I'm incredibly excited about this, even though I don't (and probably never will) have the skills & math background to work in AI/ML, even though I'll never be as employable again, even though it's also terrifying as shit. It was about time the bubble burst anyway, and big tech gave way to the next chapter. A little bit of hope is better than nothing. It ain't much, but it's there...