My co worker is beyond that. He says the AI is smarter than him and he just passes the captchas and interacts with the real world for it

I think it sounds really weird, too. I don't like the sound of that at all. I'm not a pro though.

I'll admit I enjoy carrying on little tutoring sessions with my GPU though. "How might I approach something like that?" "Can you explain this concept a bit differently?"

But I try to do all the solid brain work myself. Letting the machine write the code for me feels...kinda gross.

I actually think it's awesome that it understands coding convention and codebases and stuff well enough. Saves a lot of time digging through the wreckage of search engines...

But I don't appreciate that a lot of its "skill" is pulled from the efforts of uncompensated coders.

I only use it to solve specific problems when I can't find the solution elsewhere. Then I spend the time to understand and rewrite the code myself.

It's the same workflow as using Stack Overflow, etc. You can't just copy/paste solutions.

I try vibe coding from time to time and it’s a mixed bag. When it works it works but then there’s suddenly just code there. It’s like when a colleague implements a feature in a project with multiple devs but since it’s just your personal project you suddenly got put in the code reviewer chair.

When I write code I reason about all the small decisions but when the agent takes over I have to figure out step by step why decisions were made.

I’m still not sold on coding agents and vibecoding but it’s getting better and more usable.
The only downside is that a agent doing its thing is now seen as downtime where you could just prompt another agent and work on several projects simultaneously. If anyone ever tells you vibecoding is good because you can work in parallel RUN

"Wow this could potentially be pretty amazing, but also could cause unprecedented, catastrophic, dam--"

"TOO LATE. SHIPPED. SHIPPED TO EVERYONE. WORLDWIDE. Moneymoneymoney weeeeeeee"

yea no

calculators are deterministic

come back to me when ai isn't fucking wrong silently

that can increase the price tenfold at will

That will have to increase the price ten fold to stop bleeding billions of dollars every month.

and also the calculator is actively destroying the planet.

I dont think so. If(here is where my argument fails for most people cause i got really good education) your teacher thought you math properly tho point isnt the calculations but that you understand the logic. With ai the problem is the same with as a calculator that just spits out derivatives, graphs, etc by just typing in a formula. The reason you have to understand those is to be able to build upon it.

This is kind of like the “you won’t have a calculator with you all the time” argument

It's not even that! Students without a calculator don't see their test scores crater, the work just takes longer.

The pilots absolutely can just fuck around for most of the flight, and even during the critical moments of takeoff and landing, the plane can do a lot of it automatically these days.

Pilots need to actively practice flying without autopilot to keep those skills up in case the autopilot fails.

I feel like their point was that the gains of technology were not distributed fairly, which is largely the concern today. It’s not “technology is bad”, or “technology make bad thing”; rather, “the owners of the machine undercut our labor, and we lose our jobs”, which I think was true. In the modern world, there are likely less tailors, as a percentage of the working population, certainly in first world countries. Sweatshops still exist, and it’s people’s labor competing against a production line, in terms of ROI for a business.

I get the sense we all know AI isn’t going to bring about a uptopia for all people, because the economic systems don’t incentivize that. There’s some hypothetical world where this sort of technological advance could benefit all people, but it’s not the one we live in. That’s a reality & major problem for the technology (among other issues).

I certainly think the cost of labor for tech development is going to drop significantly due to the market pressures; look at all the tech layoffs. At the same time, the upside is these tools make certain projects accessible & possible, because prior, would have needed significant funding, amazing solo skills, etc. There’s new opportunities available, but it’ll come at the cost of cratering tech position compensation & job security.

I don’t know anyone in my field right now who feels safe (game dev), and I have many talented friends out of work.

That's not what we're talking about. Knowing how to program is just one thing. Students who use AI to cheat on theory classes won't learn the theory. Additionally in programming classes they won't learn how to program as well as they could

Finding ways to save effort is smart.

Finding ways to trade quality for convenience isn't. In the case of education, given its fundamental importance, quality is paramount. A mentor of mine phrased it as "learn to do it right first, then learn where you can get away with being sloppy". Education is the "learn to do it right" part.

In the case of programming, figuring out where you can be sloppy (and how sloppy) is a matter of experience. A junior developer doesn't have that experience. A senior developer might, but in my impression they tend to be way less excitable and preachy about using AI.

Offloading a homework during brain development to watch some TikTok

The vilification of the Luddites as cantankerous tech haters is a really good example of how malicious falsehoods can succeed, I think. I'd guess that most English speakers who know the word would define Luddite as "someone who hates technology", and I think it resonates on some level because we all hate technology some of the time. The fact that Luddites didn't indiscriminately hate technology, they just destroyed the means by which their oppressors oppressed them, is handily swept aside. And I never even questioned that narrative on Luddites until I happened to read up on them.

It's sneaky, because before then "Luddite" didn't feel like an important or politically charged term at all. It was simply a slang word for people who grump about technology. Calling people haters just short-circuits any examination of the so-called haters' reasons. It's exactly what people say about terrorists, except instead of technology its freedom. They just hate freedom. I wonder how many people have "terrorist = freedom hater" embedded so deeply they don't even think about it.