[anthk]

https://smsk.dev/2026/04/26/ai-cannot-self-improve-and-math-...

>You are not using the tools correctly.

Stop being deluded, man.

When this crap collapses into itself you will be in tears back asking for the knowledge you failed to get without the fancy Clippys.

Now, stop that fancy Megahal chatbot and learn to do things by hand.

[bitwize]

I know how to do things by hand, man. But the writing is on the wall: that skill is going the way of writing programs on punchcards. And there's little we can do about it because the economics in favor of LLMs are like laws of physics.

Yes, model collapse is gonna suck. But LLMs are not just left to self-train, they are guided by human researchers who are going to find ways to groom and direct the models to avoid collapse. They can make billions by shipping better models, so why wouldn't they invest a lot of effort in that?

[wiseowise]

> But the writing is on the wall: that skill is going the way of writing programs on punchcards.

Strange, I don’t see any punchcards inside of my computers, but for some reason I still see code behind anything that LLM does.

[anthk]

This is not terminals vs punchcards. This is like Windows ME over Windows 98. Or, maybe, the 286 over a 8086 when a 386 it's the proper path.

[vor_]

One of the amusing things about AI bros is how naively over-enthusiastic they are about the technology and its inevitability.

[bitwize]

You still don't get where I'm coming from. The AI takeover of programming is inevitable, and I hate it. But my feelings don't make the brutal economics go away. A skilled developer can now accomplish in days what used to take weeks or months with proper use of these tools. Period. I know this because of the absurd number of skilled developers here, on X, Mastodon, and elsewhere—including OP's author—saying "with AI I'm accomplishing in days what used to take me weeks or months". And if you have the opportunity to make use of the tools, you have to be stupid, or you're cutting off your nose to spite your face, not to.

[kryptiskt]

I find all those arguments unconvincing. The right 10,000 lines of code can be worth a billion dollars. The idea that it would be somehow uneconomical for me to take the time to get it right feels like utter nonsense. I don't have to have much of an edge over an LLM to come out on top once you start to distribute the resulting product. Three months of my time costs $25,000 or so (hey, I'm in Europe, adjust as you see fit), if I can make something just a little bit better than AI Albert who can whip something together for a tenth of the price, my time will pay for itself once you have modest amounts of revenue from it.

And I'm fully convinced that what I do will not just be a little bit better than what AI Al makes. It will trounce it in all quality criteria. But of course, coincidentally with the rise of AI assistance, software quality has completely disappeared from the conversation. I wonder why.

[claytongulick]

Thank you for making a really important point.

The lifespan of software can easily be ten or more years.

If it takes a few more months to write by hand to ensure correctness and proper abstraction, what does that save over the lifetime of the codebase?

[lmz]

It's a rare piece of software that lasts that long. For the rest of us there's LLMs.

[anthk]

Contrary to you I've been playing with the AI Howto stuff from TLDP forever from Markov chain based chatbots to genetic algos and neural networks and I know the limits on LLM's and how the rot on retroalimentation by reusing their own data. They can't extrapolate. Period. In every cycle they get dumber by design unless there's new human curated content. Go try to explain that to corporations having their copyrighted code being stolen away, be GPL or propietary.

[NoGravitas]

You know, economics are made by people and can be changed by them. They're historically contingent, not laws of physics.

[wiseowise]

> here, on X, Mastodon, and elsewhere

You should’ve started with this. Take a really deep breath, take your phone, find closest park, go slowly there (don’t prompt LLM on the way), find a green patch on the ground (it’s called grass) and touch it.