I just registered my kid for fall school athletics, and now feel like Heracles returning from the underworld with Cerberus on his back.
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OK, I guess I wasn't done after all.
Much of the opining about developer backlash to LLMs falls into two loose theoretical categories:
(1) Labor problem: developers now experience employment threat, loss of job security, layoffs, new levels of worry about the future
(2) Identity problem: developers used to feel special because generating code was placed on a cultural pedestal (sign of a special third brain lobe or whatever), that perceived specialness was a pillar of our personal identity, and now our egos are bruised because machines can do it and we don’t feel special anymore
While there’s doubtless truth to both of those in some / many cases, I posit a third theory:
(3) Purpose problem: contrary to popular belief, developers actually care quite a lot about the people who use our software and we derive a sense of purpose and meaning from doing what we believe to be good work; the current environment undermines that, not just LLMs but LLMs as part of a broader vortex of enshittification, and our world is effectively saying “everything you cared about doesn't matter, you can't hope to fight to make it matter, and you are stupid for caring”
I think there's evidence for that last theory in the kinds of despair you hear from developers: not just anxiety about paying the bills, not just angry feather-puffing, but a kind of existential despair that comes from the unraveling of one’s internal sense of purpose and meaning.
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4) ethical objections, especially environmental, but also intellectual property, deskilling, having to rent the right to program from far-right billionaires who are gutting democracy
Every AI think piece that doesn't at least acknowledge these issues is complicit.
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Put more concisely:
I’d bet money that developer reaction to LLM-driven development would be •very• different if its practical effect were to force management to slow down development and sink more money into quality.
5/3
@inthehands my problem with AI and more recent trends in software engineering is that whenever there is a product goal or idea it just balloones and occupies all the available space - whether its current CPU capacity, capabilities of TS framework or latest greatest protocols (remember microservices and serverless and iot).
Say 4 years ago when a “normal” company wanted to have a new business functionality they would have a budget, a MVP target and they would plan their work. 1/2
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@inthehands my problem with AI and more recent trends in software engineering is that whenever there is a product goal or idea it just balloones and occupies all the available space - whether its current CPU capacity, capabilities of TS framework or latest greatest protocols (remember microservices and serverless and iot).
Say 4 years ago when a “normal” company wanted to have a new business functionality they would have a budget, a MVP target and they would plan their work. 1/2
@inthehands Now there is no MVP, only AI budget.
There is (many times) no thinking of “hey why are we trying to build this”.
We have decades of devices that are released yearly just to drive consumption and that all do the same thing since 2011. And now they same will happen with software.
I just want this to stop
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J jwcph@helvede.net shared this topic
