[Melamune]

LLMs reveal an important truth that we were already deeply aware of. With this cognitive offloading, the interests that drive us lose their meaning. If friction disappears, there is no longer any desire, pleasure, longing, obstacle, or demand. It is indolence, and it goes by the name of apathy. All these promises without even reaching an ideal! Could it simply be that this ideal is becoming impoverished? The prevailing view is that « AI makes us stupid », so it’s actually a good thing if only the wealthy were still capable of using it. I doubt that after having experienced deprivation, shame, and death; as well as their positive counterparts, we will ever fail to overcome entropy. We will adapt, for that is all we know and can do by default. What is given without effort does not transform.

[shinycode]

That’s exactly part of the feelings I have. I always loved to learn, dig subjects, debug, create. Now I feel something has been taken away and has no value. I feel indolence and apathy. In my company the CEO explicitly says that code quality does not matter. He doesn’t care as long as we ship fast and iterate.

I am genuinely sad and feel I’m losing something and if I do everything like I used to do, I am pressured that I waste time.

[selcuka]

I'm in a similar boat. Today I commented on a junior developer's pull request, and he pasted the answer he got from Claude Code, verbatim.

Ignoring how disrespectful that behaviour is, I can't understand what value he thinks he brings in. Were you hired to be an interface between me and Claude? Because I don't need you. You are just accepting that you are redundant by doing that.

[shinycode]

Completely, we even added Claude and Cubic in our ci that drop comments on their own. It’s laziness and/or « I don’t care » on his part

[aembleton]

> Now I feel something has been taken away and has no value.

Did you feel similar when Wikipedia was created or Google or when you first got access to the internet?

All of these tools have made digging into subjects and learning easier. I find the same with AI. I love it when a random thought pops into my head and I can explore it with an AI such as Gemini. Then ask it for the sources it used so that I can read further.

AI is just a tool, much like StackOverflow. It doesn't prevent creativity, it just makes it easier and more accessible.

[amelius]

> AI is just a tool

You are forgetting that AI can also use tools.

And those AIs can be used as tools as well by other AIs.

The moment you start working on something, someone else is already automating the exact thing you are doing now.

[aembleton]

> The moment you start working on something, someone else is already automating the exact thing you are doing now.

Good. If a machine can do my job then I can work on something more interesting. Perhaps a more interesting problem to fix is having the people working on something getting told about the automation.

[karlgkk]

> If a machine can do my job then I can work on something more interesting

Oh my god, you don't get it.

The more interesting thing? Someone else is already automating doing that exact interesting thing you are doing now.

All the way down.

[xtracto]

I recently at around 42yo learned how to darn/mend my socks. My mom taught me how to do it.

I have enough money that I could just throw my socks with holes to throw trash and buy new ones inconsequentialy, but mending them by hand gives me something, it is kind of therapeutic and a sense of accomplishment.

Im sure there are machines that could do it in a second, or a patch I could stick on it as well.

Point being that we can still find satisfaction in doing things by hand that technology can do fast/easily. We just stop doing it by hand for profit.

[giardini]

I too enjoy mending my socks! I wear mostly cotton athletic socks, so sewing them up is enough. I can't darn worth a darn.

Patches I tried didn't last and I haven't found a machine that works. And it feels bad to buy a new pair of socks only b/c of a hole in the heel.

[azinman2]

Do you use a washing machine or do you manually wash your clothes in a stream?

Much of modern life is automating away the boring useless bits.

AI, on the other hand, changes the conversation on what’s boring or useless.

[trhway]

>Much of modern life is automating away the boring useless bits.

>AI, on the other hand, changes the conversation on what’s boring or useless.

A compression algorithm finds and removes redundancy. Simple automation is like simple compression algorithms (RLE like). AI (which even internally - at least the encoding to the representation parts - looks like compression) just like a much more sophisticated compression algorithm which finds and removes redundancy where we thought the creativity and originality were.

It does look like our civilization has accumulated a lot of cruft masquerading as creative/original/intellectual activities ("Bullshit jobs" comes to mind, also all that talk about stagnation in science, and all those huge collective collaborations - where collective there is a stagnation - and now with AI individual scientists will again be able to wield all the bleeding edge across the wide fields while digging deep in desired target research direction), and the AI is the vacuum cleaner for that cruft.

[gspr]

I feel the same as you. But at the same time: do you not think your CEO will be proven wrong? Maybe I'm delusional, maybe I'm just rationalizing, but surely code quality, and code understanding, does matter?

And if your CEO is right, then surely their business is doomed? If they don't understand, or can't maintain their own product, what's to stop their customers from just "making it" themselves?

How is anyone happy with this trajectory?!

[shinycode]

I’m in a similar line of thinking and actually some customers are making their own version of our tool. It’s nowhere near feature complete but it suits their needs.

Code quality does matter it’s just marketing people being shortsighted because their job is to react to the market. LLM gives a sense of « it’s kind of easy to build stuff, why bother loosing time with quality when I’m there at 80% in 20% of the time ? ».

There is compounding effects where given any big enough system this won’t scale, even Google did talks this week on this topic. So I guess you’re right, time will prove who’s right or wrong and what bet was the best with which consequence

[imtringued]

They matter, but you can't argue that human written quality code that strokes the developer's ego is so much better than AI written code of slightly less quality. Understanding also matters, but now you're trying to familiarize yourself with the AI's code, not your colleagues' code and never the code you've written yourself.

[throawayonthe]

i guess it really depends... look at claude code itself, terrible code but rakes in the money dunnit

[gspr]

> i guess it really depends... look at claude code itself, terrible code but rakes in the money dunnit

I don't know. Does it?

Also: Maintainability is a property for which the associated costs don't show up right away.

[energy123]

These things are biologically/neurologically caused. They're adaptations that worked well in our ancestral environment (effort -> reward = satisfaction, stress = effort) which are now possibly becoming maladaptations. We won't be the first organism to experience this (likely unfortunate) transition. What's concerning is that it usually precipitates something bad like large genetic alterations through natural selection or the simple elimination of the organism from certain environments (like fireflies near cities).

[irthomasthomas]

Like the lion in the zoo that gets food thrown to him.

[wwalexander]

Who do you think is going to throw food at you?

[customguy]

> All these promises without even reaching an ideal! Could it simply be that this ideal is becoming impoverished?

What ideal?

> The prevailing view is that « AI makes us stupid », so it’s actually a good thing if only the wealthy were still capable of using it.

You mean it would be a good thing?

> I doubt that [..] we will ever fail to overcome entropy

What does this mean?

> What is given without effort does not transform.

Children who have loving parents absolutely are affected by that, even if the love is given unconditionally and was there even before they had a sense of self. We are also very much transformed by living on a planet with sunlight and all that entails, and we never had to turn the sun on for that.

It's true that muscles you don't use atrophy, and that includes the brain and "the heart", but it's also true that the best things in life are free.

[Melamune]

> What ideal?

What is ideal for one person may not for another, therefore I cannot define this ideal without making a mistake. But if I had to try, I would say: answers for the scientist, paradise for the believer. As for the impoverished ideal, some of the fundamental goals that serve as a pretext for these technologies have not even been achieved and yet we are already, gradually and methodically, being stripped of using them.

> You mean it would be a good thing?

It would be a good thing, yes. Not the most desirable option, to be sure. But proportionally less harmful to all those who would then be forced to do without it and adapt without necessarily conforming. I admit it's a divisive issue and that it's unlikely to happen that way. But we won't be able to reason with those who see only progress or magic in it, nor will we be able to close this Pandora's box. Whether rightly or wrongly.

> What does this mean?

This means that, as far as we know, it is impossible to prevent the universe from deteriorating, aging, or descending into chaos, because decay and disorganization are fundamental laws. Perfection is not of this world, and thankfully so, for beings as imperfect as we are would quickly corrupt it.

> the best things in life are free.

That’s an interesting thought experiment, indeed. There are indeed things that are given to us, and for which we can be grateful. Antoine Lavoisier said, “Nothing is lost, nothing is created; everything is transformed.” That’s kind of the problem with quotes, they sound nice but don’t always take the complexity of the world into account.

It was a pleasure exchanging with you.

[customguy]

> What is ideal for one person may not for another, therefore I cannot define this ideal without making a mistake. But if I had to try, I would say: answers for the scientist, paradise for the believer.

Ah I see, I thought you had a specific ideal in mind, but you rather mean having any ideal at all, right? I agree, I'm dismayed how many view any idealism as "immature" or "unrealistic". It's very tragic IMO because we're not so passive because the world would be so hard to make better, the world is so hard to make better because we're so passive, and think so small.

> with those who see only progress or magic in it, nor will we be able to close this Pandora's box. Whether rightly or wrongly.

Hey, didn't you just deplore lack of idealism? Of course we can't reason with them, not with that attitude! But knowing that other humans just want the best for themselves and those they love, surely they shall see the good sense of our arguments, if only we bring them forth with the right cheerful spirit! I'm only half-joking, and of course you also have a point.

If "AI" does real work and gets better and better, they'll price us out, stomp us underfoot like ants. A giant blob of consumers saying "go away, batin!" until it bursts and dries out, leaving nothing but some Moloch monolith. The upside of that would be that we don't have to worry about arguments, or beat ourselves up for not having tried hard enough. We'd be like other early humans species that curiously are no longer around.

BUT if we're right, and it's really just putting everything people made into a blender, to produce a brief powder flash and then confusion and regret, we'd do well to hold on to our ideals, whatever they may be, and to caring and thinking things through as best as we can; in short, to being human. There's a new drug, a lot of people got addicted or kinda lost their minds, but a lot of them will come around, too, and should know they're always welcome back.

> This means that, as far as we know, it is impossible to prevent the universe from deteriorating, aging, or descending into chaos

Okay, so you meant we will never overcome entropy, not, as you originally wrote, that we will never fail to overcome it. You can see how that would be confusing.

> decay and disorganization are fundamental laws. Perfection is not of this world, and thankfully so, for beings as imperfect as we are would quickly corrupt it.

Not that I would call us or anything perfect (gotta keep it around as an ideal :), but that's what life does, struggle against entropy, introduce and proliferate some order, for a little while. The idea that with just enough power and/or knowledge we can somehow make a leap into a different category (one that lasts) is probably just wishful thinking, if there's even any thought involved, so the best we can do is try to be excellent, and excellent to each other.

(At least, that'd be my ideal, someone else might say we must fight as brutally as we can so at the end of time, some super stronk warrior gets to turn out the light, but it's so easy to show such things up as stupid so that's what we should keep doing)