Basically what I’ve been doing since the very beginning except instead of full prototypes I go feature by feature, and only if I’m struggling, otherwise I don’t even look at an LLM.
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@RosaCtrl I think they’re more than that; prototyping tools, but across every discipline? That’s pretty awesome.
And still, I will never use them, because of all the ick attached to them.
Maybe I will, one day, once it’s kind of normal. Assuming the world doesn’t end first.
@samir oh, yeah, they are impressive in how flexible they are, but I try to focus on what I know. I make no predictions on how these things could or couldn’t be used in disciplines I’m barely familiar.
So going back to programming, what I’m saying is that I believe they will plateau. People will get burned out (specially considering the burden of reading so much code as opposed to writing it yourself, as we have discussed before). And they will be yet another tool in your toolbox. Smaller models running locally may help to navigate code semantically («show me the function were I implemented this feature»). Prototyping will still be a thing. I’m in love with my technique of replacing TODOs with mostly functional boilerplate code. And so on an so forth. But I’m very sceptic of «you won’t need to read code» and «most code will be written by LLMs»
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@samir oh, yeah, they are impressive in how flexible they are, but I try to focus on what I know. I make no predictions on how these things could or couldn’t be used in disciplines I’m barely familiar.
So going back to programming, what I’m saying is that I believe they will plateau. People will get burned out (specially considering the burden of reading so much code as opposed to writing it yourself, as we have discussed before). And they will be yet another tool in your toolbox. Smaller models running locally may help to navigate code semantically («show me the function were I implemented this feature»). Prototyping will still be a thing. I’m in love with my technique of replacing TODOs with mostly functional boilerplate code. And so on an so forth. But I’m very sceptic of «you won’t need to read code» and «most code will be written by LLMs»
@RosaCtrl I think you nailed it. (Assuming the world doesn’t end first.)
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@RosaCtrl I think you nailed it. (Assuming the world doesn’t end first.)
@samir we will see, it wouldn’t be the first time I’m wrong…
When I Eason colleague and blogs were becoming popular in Chile, I predicted the web would kill journalism because people would be writing blogs… I expected though the blogs to be reliable sources of information
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@samir we will see, it wouldn’t be the first time I’m wrong…
When I Eason colleague and blogs were becoming popular in Chile, I predicted the web would kill journalism because people would be writing blogs… I expected though the blogs to be reliable sources of information
@RosaCtrl Well, you weren’t totally wrong. The web did kill journalism.
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@RosaCtrl Well, you weren’t totally wrong. The web did kill journalism.
@samir exactly, just not in the way I expected
But I came to realise its value. I’m pretty sure we will have a similar shock here, unless we keep pushing back. In particular I’m worried about delegating intellectual activities
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@samir exactly, just not in the way I expected
But I came to realise its value. I’m pretty sure we will have a similar shock here, unless we keep pushing back. In particular I’m worried about delegating intellectual activities
@RosaCtrl I wanna write a post about how we haven’t automated away jobs, we’ve just decided we have no need for people who are good at them.
For example, teachers. Good teachers are punished, and if they can, they eventually quit. Bad teachers persist.
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@RosaCtrl I wanna write a post about how we haven’t automated away jobs, we’ve just decided we have no need for people who are good at them.
For example, teachers. Good teachers are punished, and if they can, they eventually quit. Bad teachers persist.
@samir yeah, it’s a trend that has been going on for too many decades to count already. And it has many different shapes. Chile is a cautionary tale of your example, so it’s hard for me not to look at these things from a sociological and economical perspective.
This is why the «people that embraced LLMs for programming don’t like it» narrative makes sense to me. Keeping around the people that’s actually interested in a discipline is expensive, as it should
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@RosaCtrl I wanna write a post about how we haven’t automated away jobs, we’ve just decided we have no need for people who are good at them.
For example, teachers. Good teachers are punished, and if they can, they eventually quit. Bad teachers persist.
@samir @RosaCtrl I can't think of many jobs we actually automated away entirely; we just automated away some of the tasks that made up that job. Sometimes enough tasks that people are no longer hired to do that job. But there's usually enough that remains that couldn't be automated that the detritus of what used to be someone's job then diffuses out to become part of the shared frustration of living and working in modern society.
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@samir @RosaCtrl I can't think of many jobs we actually automated away entirely; we just automated away some of the tasks that made up that job. Sometimes enough tasks that people are no longer hired to do that job. But there's usually enough that remains that couldn't be automated that the detritus of what used to be someone's job then diffuses out to become part of the shared frustration of living and working in modern society.
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@RosaCtrl I wanna write a post about how we haven’t automated away jobs, we’ve just decided we have no need for people who are good at them.
For example, teachers. Good teachers are punished, and if they can, they eventually quit. Bad teachers persist.
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@sanityinc @RosaCtrl Goddamnit I think you’re spot on.
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@samir @RosaCtrl I can't think of many jobs we actually automated away entirely; we just automated away some of the tasks that made up that job. Sometimes enough tasks that people are no longer hired to do that job. But there's usually enough that remains that couldn't be automated that the detritus of what used to be someone's job then diffuses out to become part of the shared frustration of living and working in modern society.
@samir @RosaCtrl For teachers specifically:
I worked as one for just over 10 years. The decline of that job, I think, has little to do with automation - it's not unthinkable (in fact, I'd think it's *likely) that LLMs will finally allow automation of part of a teacher's core responsibilities ... but not all of it. There's a significant part of what a teacher does (even in adult education) that's much more about emotional labour and being a comforting and experienced human presence that I think most normal people aren't yet mangled enough to be ready to cede to machines.
What fucks over teachers (at least here in Denmark) is the same thing that fucks over nurses: It's a job where the social significance is *completely* evident, and where many of the practicioners experience it as a calling - and where they have a high feeling of duty towards the people they care for. This means they're uniquely exploitable: Management and political forces can make them put up with all sorts of terrible shit that nobody else would accept, because they don't want to let down the people they're responsible for.
Being a teacher (or nurse) is the polar opposite of a bullshit job: You *know* what you're doing has social value, but this only makes you *more* exploitable.
(I quit when ChatGPT was launched and the message from on high was that we'd have to put in extra hours to figure out how to deal with it. Right after "oh, there's a pandemic lockdown; you figure out how to rework everything on your own" had led to almost a full year of 60-70 hour workweeks.)
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@samir @RosaCtrl For teachers specifically:
I worked as one for just over 10 years. The decline of that job, I think, has little to do with automation - it's not unthinkable (in fact, I'd think it's *likely) that LLMs will finally allow automation of part of a teacher's core responsibilities ... but not all of it. There's a significant part of what a teacher does (even in adult education) that's much more about emotional labour and being a comforting and experienced human presence that I think most normal people aren't yet mangled enough to be ready to cede to machines.
What fucks over teachers (at least here in Denmark) is the same thing that fucks over nurses: It's a job where the social significance is *completely* evident, and where many of the practicioners experience it as a calling - and where they have a high feeling of duty towards the people they care for. This means they're uniquely exploitable: Management and political forces can make them put up with all sorts of terrible shit that nobody else would accept, because they don't want to let down the people they're responsible for.
Being a teacher (or nurse) is the polar opposite of a bullshit job: You *know* what you're doing has social value, but this only makes you *more* exploitable.
(I quit when ChatGPT was launched and the message from on high was that we'd have to put in extra hours to figure out how to deal with it. Right after "oh, there's a pandemic lockdown; you figure out how to rework everything on your own" had led to almost a full year of 60-70 hour workweeks.)
@datarama @samir it’s similar to what happened in Chile. Most of the people that studied to become teachers after the dictatorship didn’t want to be teachers in the first place, but couldn’t get into other disciplines. A lot of the people that wanted to become teachers studied something else to have better working conditions and higher salaries.
The similarity with automation is the goal of making workers as cheap as possible
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@datarama @samir it’s similar to what happened in Chile. Most of the people that studied to become teachers after the dictatorship didn’t want to be teachers in the first place, but couldn’t get into other disciplines. A lot of the people that wanted to become teachers studied something else to have better working conditions and higher salaries.
The similarity with automation is the goal of making workers as cheap as possible
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@sanityinc @RosaCtrl Goddamnit I think you’re spot on.
@samir @sanityinc @RosaCtrl Trouble is the system will always reward the person supporting it, and punish the one trying to do a good job despite it.
"Something something bad system something something good person etc….”
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@RosaCtrl @samir Anyway, by the time I left my teaching job, only the "hard core" was left. Everyone who *could* find a better gig in industry and didn't have a near-pathological sense of loyalty towards their students or a burning drive to teach had left long ago - and even that hard core was beginning to fray at that point - the triple punch of management abuses during lockdown, a mass layoff round due to political budget cuts, and then the GenAI crisis had the most demoralizing compound effect I've ever seen in a workplace.
I loved teaching, but I never want to work in that profession (or whatever's left of it in the near future) ever again.
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@samir yeah, it’s a trend that has been going on for too many decades to count already. And it has many different shapes. Chile is a cautionary tale of your example, so it’s hard for me not to look at these things from a sociological and economical perspective.
This is why the «people that embraced LLMs for programming don’t like it» narrative makes sense to me. Keeping around the people that’s actually interested in a discipline is expensive, as it should
@RosaCtrl @samir Anecdotally, the enthusiastic LLM users I know personally roughly fall into two groups:
- People who don't really care about software development, but got into it because of the high salaries.
- People who care a lot about software development, but are terribly burnt out and overworked, and never have the time to give anything the care it deserves anymore.(On the internet, there are also grifters and robot cultists. I don't know any of those personally.)
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@RosaCtrl @samir Anyway, by the time I left my teaching job, only the "hard core" was left. Everyone who *could* find a better gig in industry and didn't have a near-pathological sense of loyalty towards their students or a burning drive to teach had left long ago - and even that hard core was beginning to fray at that point - the triple punch of management abuses during lockdown, a mass layoff round due to political budget cuts, and then the GenAI crisis had the most demoralizing compound effect I've ever seen in a workplace.
I loved teaching, but I never want to work in that profession (or whatever's left of it in the near future) ever again.
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@samir @sanityinc @RosaCtrl Trouble is the system will always reward the person supporting it, and punish the one trying to do a good job despite it.
"Something something bad system something something good person etc….”
@thirstybear @sanityinc @RosaCtrl Yup, and it will keep going until the system fails. Which might take centuries.
