[Terretta]

There’s a sense of dread that comes from realizing that it’s not useful to “do work” anymore. That in order to thrive now, we need to outsource as much of your thinking to GPT as possible. If your sense of identity comes from “pure” intellectual pursuits, you are gonna have a bad time.

This is 180 degrees from how to think about it.

The more thinking you do as ratio to less toil, the better. The more time to apply your intellect with the better machine execution to back that up, the more profit.

The Renaissance grand masters used ateliers of apprentices and journeymen while the grand masters conceived, directed, critiqued, and integrated their work into commissioned art; at the end signing their name: https://smarthistory.org/workshop-italian-renaissance-art/

This is how to leverage the machine. It's your own atelier in a box. Go be Leonardo.

[jp8585]

I definitely understand that this is the rational way of viewing it. Leveraging these tools is an incredible feeling, but the sense of dread is always there in the corner. You can just feel a deep sense of angst in a lot of these interviews. In any case, I would rather have them and use them to their full extent than to become obsolete. Becoming Leonardo it is.

[jonplackett]

If you are capable of being a leonardo, then this approach will work.

Not everyone is capable of being Leonardo

[jp8585]

I know, right? That’s part of the angst these professionals suffer. Failure, despite having the infinite leverage provided by these tools.

[jonplackett]

People who have ideas seem to forget that a lot of people do not have ideas!

And even if everyone all of a sudden starts having ideas, only a handful will be useful and successful, and all the other ideas, and people who now have their future riding on them aren’t going to do well.

If everyone was Leonardo, what does the world look like? They can’t all be the greatest polymath of the age

[wongarsu]

The catch is that many professional environments have evolved values that above a certain quality floor reward quantity over quality. Even more so in the US where pointless torment is "work ethic" and pausing to think something through is "lazy" (see Bill Gate's famous quote about hiring lazy people, or "work smarter, not harder" almost being a rebel motto).

Granted, that's not everywhere. There are absolutely places where you will be recognized for doing amazing work. But I think many feel pressured to use AI to produce high volumes of sub-par work instead of small volumes of great work

[godelski]

  > see Bill Gate's famous quote about hiring lazy people

I think this is part of why all this is so contentious. There's been a huge culture shift over the last decade and AI is really just a catalyst to it. We went from managers needing to stop engineers from using too much abstraction and optimizing what doesn't need to be optimized to the engineers themselves attacking abstraction. Just look how people turn Knuth's "premature optimization is the root of evil" went from "get a profiler before you optimize" to "optimization? Are you crazy?"

Fewer and fewer people I know are actually passionate about programming and it's not uncommon to see people be burned out and just want to do their 9-5. And I see a strong correlation with these people embracing AI. It makes sense if you don't care and are just trying to get the job done. I don't think it's surprising things are getting buggier and innovation slowed. We killed the passion and tried to turn it into a mechanical endeavor. It's a negative feedback loop

[nl]

I've been programming professionally since the 1990s and our software has never been less buggy.

When was the last time you rebooted your OS, or even restarted your browser?

Software has never been as high quality as it is now.

[godelski]

I think you're looking at different timeframes and different types of bugs.

The last 5 years have been a drastic change for me. For over a decade I've used a Linux desktop and a laptop with various OSes. But in the last 5 years we went from my Linux desktop (Arch of all things!) from having "typical Linux issues" to my macbook having 10x more (and my arch machine being incredibly stable).

Yes, big picture stuff everything is stable and general purpose computers have blurred the line with servers.

BUT there's also a lot of frustrating day to day bugs that did not exist even a year ago. This Apple keyboard bug [0]? Infuriating! I personally hit a similar issue multiple times a day where, despite auto correct being disabled, it will change the word previous to the one I'm typing, even though it was already correct. Worse, pressing backspace delete two words. I'm with this user from years ago... "Am I getting older or is it becoming unbearable?"[1]

Many of the big picture things? Fine. But that doesn't mean I'm not being killed by a million little cuts. That's the problem. They're everywhere and when you complain about any single instance it is easy to brush off. But it isn't a single instance. It is eating hours of my day in 5 sec intervals. That's "buggy as shit"

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46232528

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33256168

[polo]

“It's your own atelier in a box. Go be Leonardo.”

So well put. 100% agree. Paraphrasing Steve Jobs I think of it as a mech suit for the mind.

[pertymcpert]

I don't necessarily agree with you completely, but I think that's a really great analogy. At the very least full of optimism.

[zdragnar]

It's a fundamentally flawed analogy. Leo's apprentices learned and improved. They studied under a master and faced serious repercussions if they bullshitted about their ability or what they had accompolished.

LLM capabilities are tied to their model, and won't improve on their own. You learn the quirks of prompting them, but they have fixed levels of skill. They don't lie, because they don't understand concepts such as truth or deception, but that means they'll spout bullshit and it's up to you to review everything with a skeptical eye.

In this analogy, you aren't the master, you're one part client demanding work, one part the janitor cleaning up after their mistakes.

[solumunus]

> one part the janitor cleaning up after their mistakes.

More often their master simply pointing out what they did wrong and instructing them to fix or improve it.

[Terretta]

All my LLM assistants are in night school learning and improving. At least I assume, since they're on such an astonishing pace of improvement.