Whens the last time you saw management tell you which compiler or toolchain you need to use to build your code ? But now we have CEOs and management dictating how coding should be done.
In the article the author admits: "I started coding again last year. But I hadn't written production code since 2012" and then goes on to say: "While established developers debate whether AI will replace them, these kids are shipping.".
Then I ask myself, what are they selling ? and lo and behold, it is AI/ML consulting.
Every praise of LLM is invariably preceded by some form of "I don't really understand their output but it looks great". That right there is the strongest signal I've caught so far that the whole thing is just a funny money pyramid.
In Sirens of Titan Vonnegut tells a story where governments decided to boost the space industry to drive aggregate demand.
This is exactly what is happening. When you realize that the whole thing is predicated on building and selling more $100,000 GPUs (and the solution to every problem therein is to use even more GPUs), everything really comes into focus.
Well, I don't really understand the detailed content of executables compiled by GCC/LLVM either, but I am not going to go back to writing assembly language. Having said that, I am old enough to remember worrying about compiler bugs, just like today I worry about LLM hallucinated vibe code. The hope is that we'll figure out how to make it more reliable---and I believe there seems to be a clear path forward.
"Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot, take thou what course thou wilt!"
But seriously, it isn't on me to justify my skepticism of the extreme claim, "We are in a race to build machine super-intelligence" because that skepticism is the rational default. Instead it's the burden of people who claim that we are in fact in that race, just like "self driving next year" was a claim for others to prove, just like "Crypto is the future of money" is a statement requiring a high degree of support.
We've seen this all before, and in the end the argument in favor seems to boil down to, "Look at how much money we're moving around with this hype" and "Trust us, the best is yet to come."
Just to clarify, I meant the rhetorical technique was being employed by the author of the article. He's downplaying the "AGI race" in order to normalize and validate the byproduct of the hype bubble to be as "normal and reliable as electricity and TCP/IP". It's clearly meant to attempt to disarm and appeal to skeptics, but there is more than enough dog whistling and performative contradiction in there to make it clear the true intention of the article -- praising Caesar.
For the record, I would be more inclined to be sympathetic towards the author if any receipts (i.e., repos) were produced at all, but as you so correctly stated, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I agree you do not have burden of defending the author's claims, apologies if that was not clear.
Whens the last time you saw management tell you which compiler or toolchain you need to use to build your code ? But now we have CEOs and management dictating how coding should be done.
In the article the author admits: "I started coding again last year. But I hadn't written production code since 2012" and then goes on to say: "While established developers debate whether AI will replace them, these kids are shipping.".
Then I ask myself, what are they selling ? and lo and behold, it is AI/ML consulting.