[asdfman123]

Because AI now can do what only humans could do previously: analyze open ended problems and make decisions.

There's the horse argument the author touches upon: eventually, technology got to the point where there weren't any profitable reasons to keep a horse.

[red-iron-pine]

"You're on to something! I will decide to delete this entire database, for some reason. Also run this command even through it will brick everything."

[asdfman123]

I'm just articulating the argument, not saying it's a done deal.

AI can actually make decisions based on open ended information, and if it gets good enough it can fully replace humans.

Will that happen? I don't know. But I will say there's an AI agent that is doing my job for me right now and it's able to now do complex refactorings, rebasing, etc. with minimal guidance.

[hunterpayne]

"But I will say there's an AI agent that is doing my job for me right now and it's able to now do complex refactorings, rebasing, etc. with minimal guidance."

Right, but doing that is slower and more expensive than just doing it by hand according to independent research. Even weirder, the average perception is that it makes coding 20% faster while at the same time making it 20% slower. And that's not nearly as weird as wanting it to actually work. If you are in that camp, there a basic concepts about society and people that you clearly don't understand.

[kelnos]

Could that change, though? It's 20% slower now, but could it be 10% faster than the human in the future? 20% faster? Or even 50% or 80% faster? I really don't know, but it's plausible.

Even today, consider that the GP's quote is trading human time/energy for external time/energy (even if the latter is greater). Manually doing a complex refactoring can be a tedious, annoying, draining, error-prone process. I don't enjoy it, and after doing it, I'll be annoyed and prickly and not feeling a bit intellectually dulled. If it takes me "only" 2 hours to do it myself, but takes the LLM 2 hours and 24 minutes, I might logically make that trade if it meant I could keep myself sharp and un-annoyed, and also perhaps get in some light reading while the LLM is doing its thing.

(In fact I am literally doing that exact thing right now, having an LLM do a refactoring while I write this comment. Maybe dicking around on HN isn't the best use of my time, but it's better than tediously shuffling existing code around, even if I can do that faster than the LLM.)

[asdfman123]

> And that's not nearly as weird as wanting it to actually work. If you are in that camp, there a basic concepts about society and people that you clearly don't understand.

I see you've found a way to speculatively insult me to save time. (You'll be glad to know that I'm not in that camp -- again, articulating an argument.)