[omblivion]

I strongly agree with the author replies. I cannot grasp the reasonment of those who underestimate the power of these tools and their growing potential. We should remember that the outside world care about things that work, not about how good they are inside sadly.

[avaer]

The outside world doesn't even care that things work, they care that it looks like it works long enough. Investors don't care that it's snake oil, as long as they're not left holding the bag.

AI is really good at making things that look like they work.

This is a steelman of your argument.

[onraglanroad]

Well yes. This has been the history of the web. Frontpage generated really crappy code but people still used it to create websites. They didn't care about code quality just how it looked.

[sarchertech]

My mom was generating web pages with dreamweaver 25 years ago. People used it sure, but people certainly did care about the quality because it produced unmaintainable code. If people truly didn’t care about the quality people would have stopped learning how to write html and CSS around 2005.

[jason_oster]

> people would have stopped learning how to write html and CSS around 2005.

They did. Now it's all JSX or htmx or some other favored template or DSL monstrosity. Most people do not write HTML or CSS, and haven't in decades. You're spot on.

This says nothing about quality, however. Quality of HTML/CSS is purely subjective. A website's presentation layer cannot meet any technical standard metric for quality in engineering or manufacturing such as durability, reliability, efficiency, or safety.

[sarchertech]

I’m not going define away blocks of HTML inside of php scripts as not writing HTML by hand, but if you want to do that then sure most people were never writing HTML and CSS by hand.

[jason_oster]

I agree, I wouldn't classify PHP as "not writing HTML by hand". But that's not what I'm talking about. Most websites in the last 20 years have heavily leaned into client-side rendering, picking up with jQuery circa 2006. It's only recently with htmx that the pendulum has started swinging back toward server-side rendering.

[ldng]

Right.

But where are Frontpage and Dreamweaver now ?

[jason_oster]

They were replaced by other WYSIWYG website editors like Wix and Squarespace. These replacements are evidence in favor of the original claim. The specific products are irrelevant.

[ldng]

It took a VERY VERY long time for these replacement products to appear.

[Younes86]

fully agree with that and it's exactly the problem and it's getting worse with muti agent.

it's look like clean and polished but its full of mess, and duplicate code, no conventions..

we're generating code faster but at what price. but the real and deep project intelligence still a bottleneck.

[red75prime]

This is a sentiment a highly skilled framework knitter could have shared. Investors don't care if those newfangled steam-powered knitting machines produce inferior textiles as long as people buy it.

Parallels to the industrial revolution are apparent. And this is disturbing.

[graemep]

> We should remember that the outside world care about things that work, not about how good they are inside sadly.

Until they go wrong because they are not good inside.

[an0malous]

I don’t know, I don’t think anyone really cares. I can’t unmute videos on Twitter/X on iOS, it’s been like that for over a year. I get a new disclosure that my data was leaked about every month. Palantir and possible Claude targeted a girl’s school for missile strikes. I still have to tell Claude what day or time it is right now sometimes, or it’ll give me medical advice for my dog and the dosing or some important number is 2-5x off. At my last job, at a YC company, I was explicitly told to stop working on vulnerabilities that let you do things like arbitrarily change a user’s email address through unprotected admin endpoints. Ten years ago I would’ve gotten a raise for this.

We’re in some weird stage of capitalism where everything is a grift and nobody really cares anymore.

[vinyl7]

> We’re in some weird stage of capitalism where everything is a grift and nobody really cares anymore.

I've felt this way for a long time now. There's no substance to anything anymore. The US economy feels like a more advanced Nigerian scam, where very few things that the US makes provides anything of actual value and substance. Americans just can't afford quality anymore. We decided we'd like to have significant amounts of garbage rather than fewer quality things. This change was likely due to revving the economy toward quarterly profit goals and GDP growth over everything else. Theoretically, prioritizing investments should have "trickled down" where companies could have more capital to invest in workers, R&Dand quality...but instead it all just got soaked up into executive pay and the stock market.

[graemep]

Its short termism. its the same throughout the west and beyond. The markets want returns on a one or two year period, not long term investment. Executive pay is almost always tied to short term profits and share prices.

[Chu4eeno]

Yeah, it's the perversion of capitalism known as publicly traded companies.

Once you start noticing private companies (like some restaurant chains) manage to both treat their employees better and serve their customers better than the publicly traded ones, it seems like a very consistent trend.

Having pursuit of endless growth to appease otherwise uninvolved shareholders might not be the best way to do "capitalism".

[graemep]

Someone who is trying to build a business they can sell when they retire, or that they might leave to their kids, thinks on a completely different time scale. Smaller businesses are also run more by personal judgement and relationships than by rules and procedures.

[bigstrat2003]

> We should remember that the outside world care about things that work, not about how good they are inside sadly.

How good something is inside is directly responsible for how well it works. Your customers might not care about the former, but they will care when your cuts to the former impact the latter (and they always do impact it, in the end).

[archagon]

Actually, the outside world is in a constant state of low-grade rage at how poorly software works these days. Slop code will only accelerate this trend.

For the most part, people don’t need a thousand new features; the investment class does. Nobody gets mad at Craigslist.

[mschuster91]

> Actually, the outside world is in a constant state of low-grade rage at how poorly software works these days.

The problem is... what can we practically do? When the village fish monger 200 years ago sold shoddy fish, you could go to him, give him a few whacks with his fish, and even if the fish monger didn't improve the quality of the fish he sold in response, you at least got some kind of feeling you got justice.

Nowadays? For most of the world, those responsible for the bad software aren't in the same village any more, for 95% of the world's population the USA is on an entirely different continent. Can't do anything to hold anyone accountable, with the exception of cancelling a 5$/month subscription LOL and yelling at some poor Filipino or Indian callcenter grunt. If you're among the lucky 5% that lives in the US, sure, you can file lawsuits if the problem is egregious enough, but that's expensive and consumer protection has been gutted. And doing a copy of a plumber's brother event? Might give you people treating you like jesus-come-to-earth but in the end you'll still face capital punishment for it, if you don't get taken out by the private security of the uber rich before you can even raise your gun.

Whatever the eventual solution to the problem you raise will end up being, it is certain it will not be pretty... bottled up rage is not good for any society.

[jazz9k]

This is true. I have artist friends that are boycotting any company using AI art for their flyers/ads.

I looked at some examples and couldn't tell the difference.

[foobarbecue]

I think you can't tell the difference until the "art" shows details of something you know well -- a place you've been, out a hobby or sport you do.

I'm thinking of this awful slop "art" I saw on Wayfair yesterday. As a surfer, it's hilarious. That's not how you stand on a board. It's not even a board. And the wave is terrible-- nobody wants to surf shorebreak like that! https://www.wayfair.com/decor-pillows/pdp/design-art-4-hawai...

I guess it could be a useful signal-- if you meet someone and they have it up in their home, you know they don't surf.

More generally, I think anything AI produces that's dense with factual details is inherently trash.

[pc86]

I was just reading comments the other day where people who dragging a company because they apparently used AI for some low level copywriting stuff. No art assets, no code (so far as anyone knows), not actually writing copy but more like "is everything spelled right, does the copy structure flow, have all these points been addressed, etc." Not only that but the only reason anyone even knew is because the company was completely up front and transparent about what they used AI for and what they didn't.

There is a visceral hate in the artistic community toward AI that doesn't really make sense to me tbh.

[daveshistory]

I would imagine it is like transcribing, an industry I was in for a little bit when I was younger. I saw the same transition there and imagine it will be elsewhere. First it's a bunch of people saying "AI can't take our jobs, our jobs are thinking jobs." Then it's "Sure, you could use AI, but there's no real advantage to it because it makes so many mistakes."

But pretty soon after that it's "Why am I paying a transcriptionist $3/minute when I can just have the machine auto-transcribe it and then my admin assistant can just scan it for mistakes."

Even if there still IS a quality difference between great writers and AI product, "good enough" is good enough for most customers, especially if you have to pay professional rates to get better.

[rfgplk]

Exactly, time amortized LLMs are already unbeatable at this point.

[daveshistory]

I go back and forth on it a lot myself; and it's not just in the office context.

Grandkid's sports club had an AI-made song about the group at Christmas. It was "good enough" for that. Did they steal the job of a local band? Well, in the sense that the club would have had to commission a song. But in reality, the club wouldn't have paid money for that.

They won't pay money to commission Anthropic (or in that case I assume something like Suno) to make the song in the future either. They just won't pay the money at all. A lot of "valuable" human work will be replaced, but it won't be profitable for the companies. I bet more stuff is being transcribed now than ever before -- but not much money is being made on it.

[watwut]

> There is a visceral hate in the artistic community toward AI that doesn't really make sense to me tbh.

Really? Have you seen how the CEOs marketed it and talked about people in that community? Artists hate it, because they listened to what AI community and leadership were openly saying.

The weirdest thing on this all is how people find the hate puzzling considering initial rhetoric coming from the industry itself. And current rhetoric for that matter.

[bluefirebrand]

Right? AI evangelists never seem to miss an opportunity to be clueless about this

"Why do you guys hate AI so much? All I did was tell you it's so great that it makes your skills worthless and how glad I am that I won't need people like you around in the future to make art and designs. What's wrong with that?"

[watwut]

What I noticed was that it was not just about money. It is not like people could live out of art last decades anyway. Artists actually know it better then anyone. But the disdain toward things artistic people value and like was noticeable. Even when one has bad economic news, surely it should be possible to say then without being gleeful arrogant jerk. Which is exactly what the message was.

It is just ... we insulted those people, told them they are worthless, when they want to talk about things they like doing we tell them they should use AI and then we act all puzzled they hate us. How could that happen.

And you can see it again and again.

[bluefirebrand]

That's certainly a big part of it for me too

There's a large amount of voices, both online and off, that are sneering. Between crabs in a bucket happy that software devs are being clawed down, and people happy thinking they no longer need us

I'm worn down by a cacophony of voices telling me I'm no longer wanted or needed. I'm very tired.

[matheusmoreira]

Have you seen the arrogance of artists? They acted as though they were above replacement, above automation. They acted as though they were superior.

We're all facing very hard times ahead of us, but I would be lying if I said it wasn't at least a little cathartic to watch this unfold. Programmers, too, were just as arrogant until only a few years ago. As were doctors, lawyers... The list goes on. How the mighty have fallen.

Now we just gotta allow AIs to replace all these lavishly compensated CEOs too. Now that'd be epic.

[Planktonne]

Do you see how this sort of hate-filled malevolence, as a pro-AI position, might make people less excited about AI?

A lot of people are looking at AI now and seeing that its proponents sound like cartoon villains. That sends a message.

[matheusmoreira]

I certainly do. The only point I'm making is those people are sending plenty of messages of their own. You say that AI proponents sound like cartoon villains. To me the AI detractors sound a lot like elite lords being forcibly deposed from their titles. People who thought they were superior, but were proven wrong.

The only crime here would be stopping the AI onslaught just short of replacing the really powerful people. Let it happen.

[vrganj]

The outside world itself will stop working if we replace labor with LLMs.

Mass unemployment equals riots equals an end to the status quo.

[DoctorOetker]

riots lead to hiring more police, so loyalty, prostitution, and sponsored eunuchships will be future career list. Those who are lucky can become a rent-a-pal.

[pc86]

This doesn't seem at all related to the above comment - or anything, for that matter. Nobody is suggesting we "replace labor" with LLMs.

[vrganj]

> Nobody is suggesting we "replace labor" with LLMs.

I take it you haven't been listening to what the guys at the AI labs have been saying?

Plus that's what the whole article is about. I'm not sure how you could've missed that?

[pc86]

You could replace every software engineer on the planet with a perfect LLM tomorrow and it would not lead to mass unemployment-triggered riots. If you're talking about software engineering specifically, you're not correct. If you're talking about all labor, you're talking about something unrelated to the article.

[philipwhiuk]

The job of software engineering is more or less literally to automate every other job. If there are no software engineers it's because everything is or has been automated. If AI isn't capable of that then there's still software engineering to do and your argument collapses.

[vrganj]

To quote the article:

> Take copywriting. It was a profession that took years to master and paid well. This changed slowly as more professionals joined the market, even after the demand spike driven by ecommerce and adtech. Now, LLMs have destroyed the job for the vast majority of professionals.

[queenkjuul]

The article very explicitly discusses the replacement of all knowledge workers. You sure you read it?

[rfgplk]

> Plus that's what the whole article is about. I'm not sure how you could've missed that?

Even if code typing goes away, a new breed of engineering will take it's place.

[jason_oster]

Do you normally listen to quacks? You clearly don't believe them. Why are you even paying any attention to it?

[peterspath]

The next big revolution probably involves burning down datacenters.

[DoctorOetker]

Sounds like a knowledge worker task description on figuring out how to stop the masses from burning down datacenters.