- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
The thing I hate the most about AI and it’s ease of access; the slow, painful death of the hacker soul—brought not by war or scarcity, but by convenience. By buttons. By bots. […]
There was once magic here. There was once madness.
Kids would stay up all night on IRC with bloodshot eyes, trying to render a cube in OpenGL without segfaulting their future. They cared. They would install Gentoo on a toaster just to see if it’d boot. They knew the smell of burnt voltage regulators and the exact line of assembly where Doom hit 10 FPS on their calculator. These were artists. They wrote code like jazz musicians—full of rage, precision, and divine chaos.
Now? We’re building a world where that curiosity gets lobotomized at the door. Some poor bastard—born to be great—is going to get told to “review this AI-generated patchset” for eight hours a day, until all that wonder calcifies into apathy. The terminal will become a spreadsheet. The debugger a coffin.
Unusually well-written piece on the threat AI poses to programming as an art form.
AI is the best thing that happened to us for ages: now we can do whatever we do without the pain and humiliation of spending enormous amount of time seeking through some shitty documentation or, in too many cases, straightforwardly bruteforcing the libs by guessing what the fuck parameters this or that function needs.
Now I can just ask an AI if there is a method in this class that does something I need and receive a useful answer, not a RTFM like in the times you’re so fond of.
Yes, as long as the information you get from the AI is correct. Which we know is absolutely not the case. That is the issue. If AI’s output could be trusted 100% things would be wildly different.
Right it can totally do that safely and axcurately despite not being able to count the Rs in strawberry.
So if library users stop communicating with each other and with the library authors, how are library authors gonna know what to do next? Unless you want them to talk to AIs instead of people, too.
At some point, when we’ve disconnected every human from each other, will we wonder why? Or will we be content with the answer “efficiency”?
That was why it was so entertaining, getting a lil homebrew to run on the Nintendo DS was fun.