I would suggest it is a phenomenon that is well studied, and has many forms. I guess mostly identify preservation. If you dislike AI from the start, it is generally a very strongly emotional view. I don't mean there is no good reason behind it, I mean, it is deeply rooted in your psyche, very emotional.
People are incredibly unlikely to change those sort of views, regardless of evidence. So you find this interesting outcome where they both viscerally hate AI, but also deny that it is in any way as good as people claim.
That won't change with evidence until it is literally impossible not to change.
It pretty much is, unless you think it's totally cool to work in highly dangerous jobs that paid poorly while being treated like chattel slaves. There is a reason why the 1800s had the most violent labor actions in the US, it wasn't because they were treated "well."
Completely disingenuous, learn your labor history.
I am a member of an expensive gym in our home town. It has a very good gym but also includes spa facilities. The only reason I pay the price is because it also includes a working area, and because I work remotely most of the week, I do it from the gym, so I have no excuse not to exercise and I also find the spa a good way to unwind. It's a nice way to avoid the long commute to the office but also get out the house.
Anyway, the point to the story is money doesn't buy class. The gym parking is gated and leads into a huge parking area. What happens is that a certain percentage of people consider themselves above everyone else and don't fancy walking the extra 20-100 meters to park in an actual parking, so they just park on the "road" that feeds into the the various parking areas, as it is close to the gym. This means it blocks one lane of that road and cars get backed up having to go around the parked cars.
I always hear announcements calling for the owners of certain license plates, and always know it was these cars. It infuriates me so much. Lately the gym has had to resort to cones along the edges of the road to stop the arseholes.
I just can't fathom such people. It feels so alien to me that I (I mean this literally) can't imagine what actually goes through your head to do that. For anyone who is this selfish, can you explain? Does it not occur to you that this is wrong? Or do you know it and just think "life is unfair, I do what is best for me"? I genuinely don't get it.
So yeah, a bit off topic, and I'm unsure if your 20% figure is too high, but there certainly are a lot of people in the world that are just not nice.
About 5% of people are narcissistic sociopaths. They don't believe that other people exist, or at least are anything more than actors in a play they control. Try not to elect one as President.
I think the point is, what does it add to the discussion mentioning the language it is written in?
This is a rust trait. Titles farm karma like that because "Presenting: myapp" vs "Presenting: myapp written in rust", the latter will receive more attention.
Unfortunately, if you reveal that you use AI in your projects, you will instantly turn a segment of your readers against you, even if your project is objectively good.
I suspect a lot of people don't reveal that they use AI for this reason.
I guide the AI. If I see it produce stuff that I think can be done better, I either just do it myself or point it in the right direction.
It definitely doesn't do a good job of spotting areas ripe of building abstractions, but that is our job. This thing does the boring parts, and I get to use my creativity thinking how to make the code more elegant, which is the part I love.
As far as I can tell, what's not to love about that?
If you’re repeatedly prompting, I will defer to my usual retort when it comes to LLM coding: programming is about translating unclear requirements in a verbose (English) language into a terse (programming) language. It’s generally much faster for me to write the terse language directly than play a game of telephone with an intermediary in the verbose language for it to (maybe) translate my intentions into the terse language.
In your example, you mention that you prompt the AI and if it outputs sub-par results you rewrite it yourself. That’s my point: over time, you learn what an LLM is good at and what it isn’t, and just don’t bother with the LLM for the stuff it’s not good at. Thing is, as a senior engineer, most of the stuff you do shouldn’t be stuff that an LLM is good at to begin with. That’s not the LLM replacing you, that’s the LLM augmenting you.
Enjoy your sensible use of LLMs! But LLMs are not the silver bullet the billion dollars of investment desperately want us to believe.
> as a senior engineer, most of the stuff you do shouldn’t be stuff that an LLM is good at to begin with
Your use of the word "should" is pointing to some ideal that doesn't exist anymore.
In current actual reality, you do whatever your employer gives you to do, regardless of your job title.
If you have 40 years of broad development experience but your boss tells you to build more CRUD web apps or start looking for another job in the current ATS hell, then the choice whether to use coding agents seems obvious to me.
I think the point is that if you're building yet-another-CRUD web app, why aren't you abstracting more of it away already? It's not like we don't have the facilities for this in programming languages already.
The main issue with current LLM hypers is the complete unrealistic scenarios they come up with. When building a CRUD app, the most obvious solution is to use a framework to take care of the common use cases. And such framework will have loads of helpers and tools to speed up boilerplate.
An LLM isn’t (yet?) capable of remembering a long-term representation of the codebase. Neither is it capable of remembering a long-term representation of the business domain. AGENTS.md can help somewhat but even those still need to be maintained by a human.
But don’t take it from me - go compete with me! Can you do my job (which is 90% talking to people to flesh out their unclear business requirements, and only 10% actually writing code)? It so, go right ahead! But since the phone has yet to stop ringing, I assume LLMs are nowhere there yet. Btw, I’m helping people who already use LLM-assisted programming, and reach out to me because they’ve reached their limitations and need an actual human to sanity-check.
I'm from the early 90s era. I know exactly what you're saying. I entered the internet on muds, irc and usenet. There were just far fewer people online in those communities in those days, and in my country, it was mostly only us university students.
But, those days disappeared a long time ago. Probably at least 20-30 years ago.
People are incredibly unlikely to change those sort of views, regardless of evidence. So you find this interesting outcome where they both viscerally hate AI, but also deny that it is in any way as good as people claim.
That won't change with evidence until it is literally impossible not to change.
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