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by GrinningFool 116 days ago
I think it's often genuine excitement to share a thing - without quite processing that anybody with the same idea can now build it (for simple- to mid-complexity projects).
3 comments

I also think it is often momentum from “do you have a GitHub” questions you see in hiring.

There are many people who code to make cool stuff and enjoy sharing, but there is even more people who code to look good on CV.

I’m not trying to be mean, this is just an anecdote I had from my time hiring.

KG: Anybody coulda wrote it, anybody coulda done that, one song, just one note

JB: Yeah but guess who did write it, me!

KG: Yeah but did you write this?

JB: Dude, I did, I told you to do the bendy every once in a while!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLvOLjHt4S0

I win. 1 to nothing!
This is the part I don't understand. It's like sharing a finger painting half the time. Yes, cool, but so what?

[Edit: no need for the downvote, folks, it was an honest question although it seemed otherwise. I think the answers below make sense.]

The novelty of "new thing! That would have been incredibly hard a decade ago!" hasn't worn off yet.

This isn't the first time something like this has happened.

I would imagine that people had similar thoughts about the first photographs, when previously the only way to capture an image of something was via painting or woodcutting.

When movies first came out they would film random stuff because it was cool to see a train moving directly at you. The novelty didn't wear off for years.
There was something someone said in a comment here, years and years ago (pre AI), which has stuck with me.

Paraphrased, "There's basically no business in the Western world that wouldn't come out ahead with a competent software engineer working for $15 an hour".

Once agents, or now claws I guess, get another year of development under them they will be everywhere. People will have the novelty of "make me a website. Make it look like this. Make it so the customer gets notifications based on X Y and Z. Use my security cam footage to track the customer's object to give them status updates." And so on.

AI may or may not push the frontier of knowledge, TBD, but what it will absolutely do is pull up the baseline floor for everybody to a higher level of technical implementation.

And the explosion in software produced with AI by lay-people will mean that those with offensive security skills, who can crack and exploit software systems, will have incredible power over others.
are you sure that AI generated code will be more vulnerable than a median software engineer? Why?
It's always a year® away. The amazing AI capability is "just around the corner"©. It will replace jobs soon™.

How much longer do we have to put up with people saying this? It's been four years now.

The things that people were saying were a year away a year or two ago are now here.

The things I am saying are now a year away, are not the things people were saying were a year away two years ago.

And you're going to have to put up with it forever, because "a year in the future" has always and will always be a year away.

Did you try the new models that came out in the end of last year? -- It's not just progress it's a breakthrough. /s
I have a similar feeling to people who upload their AI art to sites like danbooru. Like I guess I can understand making it for yourself but why do you think others want to see it
Because these people aren't excited about the actual building part, they crave the attention, the github stars, the views, &c. It's painfully obvious
xkcd turned stick figure drawings into an art form. sometimes it is not about how something was created, but about the story being told.

some people build apps to solve a problem. why should they not share how they solved that problem?

i have written a blog post about a one line command that solves an interesting problem for me. for any experienced sysadmin that's just like a finger painting.

do we really need to argue if i should have written that post or not?