[lins1909]

What if I just enjoy how I work at the moment and don't really care about this stuff? Why do I _have_ to give it a go? Why don't LLM evangelists accept this as an option?

Choosing not to use AI agents is maybe the only tool position I feel I've had to defend or justify in over a decade of doing this, and it's so bizarre to me. It almost reeks of insecurity from the Agent Evangelists and I wonder if all the "fear" and "uncertainty" they talk about is just projecting.

[mkozlows]

Nobody pushed you to use git when you were comfortable with svn? Nobody pushed you to use Docker when you were comfortable running bare metal? Nobody pushed you to write unit tests when you were comfortable not? Nobody pushed you to use CSS for layout when you were happy using tables?

Some of those are before your time, but: The only time you don't get pushed to use new technologies is when a) nothing is changing and the industry is stagnant, or b) you're ahead of the curve and already exploring the new technology on your own.

Otherwise, everyone always gets pushed into using the new thing when it's good.

[eichin]

The engineers using svn were the ones who were pushing for git - I was the one saying "we can't, because none of the conversion tools competently preserve branch history, and it's even worse on repos that started in CVS". Noone responsible for repos was pushing for git, it was end-users pulling for it (and shutting up when they learned how much work it would cause :-) That looked nothing like the drug-dealer-esque LLM push I've been seeing for the last 3 years.

(Likewise with CVS to svn: "you can rename files now? and branches aren't horrible? Great, how fast can we switch?" - no "pushing" because literally everyone could see how much better it was in very concrete cases, it was mostly just a matter of resource allocation.)

In the context of this discussion, it feels more like ipv6 :-)

[danaris]

Git had obvious benefits over svn.

Docker has obvious benefits over bare metal.

Etc.

My own experiences with LLMs have shown them to be entertaining, and often entertainingly wrong. I haven't been working on a project I've felt comfortable handing over to Microsoft for them to train Copilot on, and the testimonials I've seen from people who've used it are mixed enough that I don't feel like it's worth the drawbacks to take that risk.

And...sure, some people have to be pushed into using new things. Some people still like using vim to write C code, and that's fine for them. But I never saw this level of resistance to git, Docker, unit tests, or CSS.

[mkozlows]

The resistance to those things was less angry, but it was there. giveupandusetables dot com no longer exists, but you can find plenty of chin-stroking blog posts about it. It was a big argument in the late aughts!

[rsynnott]

> Nobody pushed you to use git when you were comfortable with svn?

Generally, sensible companies held off on this sort of transition until the tool was mature and stable.

Way back in the day, I was involved in an abortive move from CVS to SVN. It went great for a week, then the SVN db corrupted itself irretrievably, taking a week's work with it... I think we finally moved for real about a year later, when SVN had abandoned its extremely unreliable BDB backend that early versions used.

Forcing adoption of [AI tool of the month] now feels a bit more like, say, adopting Darcs back during the DVCS wars than adopting git after it had won.

[mycall]

> Otherwise, everyone always gets pushed into using the new thing when it's good.

and then there is AS/400 and all the COBOL still in use which AI doesn't want to touch.

[sixtyj]

Some people don’t like to be pushed. They want their own rhythm.

But when you stop trying new stuff (“because you don’t want to”), it is a sign that your inner child got lost. (Or you have a depression or burnout.)

[lins1909]

Lol. Surely this depends on what the new stuff is? Looks like all nuance goes out of the window when agents are involved.

[hypeatei]

I'm the same as you: I don't really care about this stuff. Given what we know about the start of these AI endeavors (torrenting/scraping the whole internet and training on it) then running their software seems like a liability. Is it pasting code verbatim that falls under an incompatible license? Is it training on my codebase? Why would I want to depend on this very compute intensive, cloud hosted tool?

At least with other advancements in our field like git, Docker, etc., they're made with a local-first mindset (e.g. your git repos can live anywhere and same with your docker images)

[onion2k]

It almost reeks of insecurity from the Agent Evangelists and I wonder if all the "fear" and "uncertainty" they talk about is just projecting.

That's probably true on some level for some evangelists, but it's probably just as true that some people who are a bit scared of AI read every positive post about it as some sort of propaganda trying to change their mind.

Sometimes it's fine to just let people talk about things they like. You don't know what camp someone is in so it's good to read their post as charitably as possible.

[johnfn]

I think the standing assumption is that most of us take pride and enjoyment in being good at our craft - and some of us even want to be great at it. That means understanding all the tools at our disposal - to see if they are useful or not.

If that is not interesting to you I think that’s a totally fine choice, but you’re getting a lot of pushback from people who have made a different choice.

[shantara]

I've seen a lot of developer tooling change and evolve over the course of my career, but with AI it was the first time I've seen people in non-technical managerial positions trying to force the engineers to make a switch. It was extremely bizarre.

[nlawalker]

You don’t have to! Enjoy it! Just don’t bank on getting paid for it indefinitely. That’s the aspect of it that’s causing so much consternation.

[lins1909]

And don't bank on getting economic benefits out of being able to use Claude Code too!

[vidar]

Your work will eventually be driven by the same economics as the industry as a whole, project estimates 12 months from now will be done based on how long it takes a dev with full LLM backing, not your current speed. Then you need to be prepared to work at that speed.

[kranner]

This confidence may be somewhat premature at this stage. The industry is extremely fashion-driven and may decide that agentically-based development results in mediocre and unmaintainable code. It depends too on how the flagship models develop.

Also not all of us need to sell ourselves as high-speed AI-boosted developers, especially those with decades of experience. Investors might well choose to invest in artisanal coding, and many of us can act as our own investors as well. So the inevitability of agentism is still undecided IMHO.

[retrac98]

You don’t have to, of course, but you probably will if you want to be competitive in a professional capacity in the future.

Not doing so seems a bit like a farmer ploughing fields and harvesting crops by hand while seeking to remain competitive with modern machinery, surely?

[kranner]

It remains to be seen whether these analogies will still hold in the longer term, or whether agentic code will come to be seen as cheap but buggy and mediocre.

[Aeolun]

> Why do I _have_ to give it a go?

Because your boss is going to want you capable of using these things effectively even as shortly as 1-2 years from now? If not them, then their boss.

[halJordan]

What? Was anyone forcing people off vim when vs code dropped? No, go use vim. Same here. Why are you acting persecuted when you can literally do nothing.