[runarberg]

knitting machines don’t generate the design from a prompt, and neither does industrial knitwear production facilities. In fact, knitting machines have quite a lot of manual input that goes into the final product, including careful programming.

[beernet]

> In fact, knitting machines have quite a lot of manual input that goes into the final product, including careful programming.

Equally true for today's AI coding agents

[runarberg]

Not equally true at all. Far from it. If you have ever seen people use knitting machine you would know the amount of skill required to operate one is far beyond creating a prompt. Same is true of looms, etc.

In fact this whole analogy makes no sense, a knitting machine is far closer to a compiler in this analogy then it is to a language model. Many would argue that automatic looms were the first compilers of the industrial age, and I would agree with that argument.

[beernet]

I was never talking about a knitting machine in the first place. Rather, I was referring to the old lady sitting on her sofa, knitting a sock she could also buy for a dollar, but decides to do it herself for the love of the game and nostalgia: a hobby.

The "art" of programming is going exactly that route, maybe with a little fewer ladies and more men.

[runarberg]

I didn’t hear the exact analogy so I made some assumption. But I fail to see any insightful analogy which could make such predictions, unless the analogy is operating on top of some flawed assumptions about industrial knitware production.

An old lady could equally sit in front of her desktop PC write some HTML, and upload a blog page with her amazing knitting projects, or she could get pintrest. This was true before LLMs, and it is still true today.

Another potential flaw is the assumption that professional knitwear design does not exist. It does. Plenty of people work in industrial scale knitwear products. We have people designing new products, making patterns and recipes, we have manual labor in the production, operating machines or even knitting by hand. Case in point, travel anywhere and go to a local market popular with tourists, and you will see plenty of mass produced knitted products, most of them took great skill to design and produce. Nothing compatible to prompting an LLM to do this for you.

[captainbland]

Not for long, presumably. Apparently the majority of marketable skills will come from a handful of capex heavy, trillion dollar corporations and you will like it.