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- Hacker News
- LLMs actually _improved_ this for me, because they can be the sparring partner and the endless lexicon of interconnected thoughts, most other humans simply lack the ability to.
They do have their limits too, but I'd genuinely, objectively say that for me and how my brain is wired, they've given me the "community" context that the world could not really provide.
I do feel like I'm approaching the limits of what they can do there though. It's worse as soon as the things see the prompts of most public-facing harnesses, but even without that, they can only do so much.
Real humans would have a better intellectual community to offer, but for that, you actually need to find them first and hope that your schedules and energy budgets both align.
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I think as much as we're seeing consequences of AI there, we're even more seeing the consequences of how society itself has been strip mined by big corps and big tech.
Human connection is dead not because of AI but because of Social Media.
Motivation is dead not because of AI or weakness but because spaces and contexts that would foster that have been replaced with corporate-approved standardized gray.
Globalization plays a role here. Atomization. Urbanization.
The expectation to hop around the nation for your job, nuking any ability at building a local community.
Context collapse glueing massive amounts over overhead on every single communication transmission.
Etc etc.
AI is often not a cause but just an accelerator.
by hypfer - I wrote a blog post making some very similar arguments earlier this week in response to some mathematicians’ takes—just before the OpenAI paper drop a few days ago (https://creating.software/essays/ai-and-math/).
I feel we’re all realizing, at the same time, that (1) intellectual activity is communal, and yet (2) those communities are sustained by recognition of individual achievement. What a way to find this out.
I claim (here and in my post) that humanity actually can’t advance without these human communities. It’s critical that people not give up learning things that AI knows better than they do, because they play an important role in these communities, and the community is critical.
My (maybe naive) hope is still that people find ways to keep doing this stuff for fun, like chess (competitions, awards, coaches, I don’t know). We still have chess competitions and the like, even though computers are far better at chess and have been for a while. The community and the recognition of individual achievement are both there. And human chess and chess engines have gotten vastly better, so computer dominance failed to kill progress in chess (today’s stockfish would’ve beaten Kasparov in 1997 running on a desktop from 1994: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4MLBK7iCW3vYd93Mn/a-closer-l...)
Maybe math olympiads and programming contests live on well past the end of their practical utility—I always liked them.
by msteffen - The author brings up several examples along the lines of: 'why write a blog post about how something was built' or 'why bother making a technical note public', or 'why bother writing a new language', etc, since the LLMs will just ingest it and never credit you and no one will know.
What this really points to is a new ecosystem which is now built on theft.
I agree, the depression is real, and it has destroyed the community of code as well as the individual spirit of wanting to do, well, anything. What's the point of building anything? Anyone could prompt an AI to get some result, there is no real intelligence necessary. But what has led to this situation? Theft. The plundering of all our collective work and all the intellectual effort that was put into it.
This became really clear to me today while I was playing around with the new Illustrator/Photoshop AI-coded ripoffs of the Adobe suite. (Excuse me, VectorCraft is an "open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Illustrator, rebuilt in pure Rust" per their Github).
I may loathe Adobe and wish I didn't have to pay them another dime. But there is a fundamental difference between a group of people sitting down to build a replacement for Illustrator (like e.g. Affinity), and someone prompting an AI to just rewrite Illustrator from scratch. The AI is laundering other people's work. The AI contains a compressed version of billions of lines of code, and from that it is unpacking essentially a pirated Frankenstein binary, washed of attribution. It may have no lines of code in common with Illustrator, but everything it has was taken from code that someone wrote.
Imagine someone writes a book and you want to distribute it for free. If you reconstruct the book by taking random words clipped out of newspapers and pasted together, that's still a copy of the book.
The question is, what's anyone's motivation to write anything anymore? Who's going to write a new, better language? But we would not be in this situation except for the grand theft which allowed the creation of LLMs in the first place.
by noduerme - There's several things I disagree with in this post (a matter of perspective, I think):
> The discourse around software engineering has gotten dumber. It’s like everyone in the industry lost 30 IQ points. People used to talk about compilers, type systems, logic. Now they talk about “prompts”, “harnesses”, “loops”. The discourse is narrower, shallower, and more repetitive. There’s only so many times I can hear about “agentic harnesses” before I lose my mind.
I agree with the frustration here :)
> You design a revolutionary new programming language: who cares? Maybe Claude cares, for what that’s worth. But humans don’t write or even read the code anymore. The programming language is an implementation detail the humans no longer have to care about.
Perhaps the people who weren't inclined to think about compilers, type systems, and logic before coding agents will never think about those things. If anything, I think about those systems significantly more now, because I view them as ways to describe the search space for the agent ... and perhaps, in the future, even tools to structure agentic latent representations.
So I propose rotating your viewport: yes, perhaps entertain the idea that it doesn't make sense to think about these things for human consumption ... but instead, what if we think of programming language and compiler design as being a tool to control the search space, and suddenly there's lots of new ways to think about these things.
Is this a valuable way to think? I'm not sure, but we should try and find out.
by mccoyb - Yes. I've told a few friends and acquaintances that somehow AI is the least interesting technology in my lifetime - the boosters use AI to write about how they used AI to build new tools to help them AI their AI, the haters write (or sometimes, shockingly, use AI to write) about how AI will AI all of us. Have you tried this new skill? Read my research paper, it shows that AI can do good work unsupervised? Oh, yeah, that's interesting, what do you think about how it did X, Y, and Z? I dunno man, I didn't spend that much time on it.
It's getting lonely out there, even if or especially if you've converged on "I don't care much about AI".
by _dwt - I really liked this. I've felt the exact thing the author is describing - I used to care a lot about my craft (iOS apps), and that has been blown apart by AI. Not that craft and taste isn't still a differentiator - I think it's just so much less satisfying to create something perfect over weeks, if you can get 80% of the way in an afternoon.
"Private intellectual activity that is sustained, complex, and long-term requires an external intellectual community to provide material and motivation, like fuel and oxidizer. That private activity, in turn, sustains the community..."
I think a lot of the greatest art has been produced by this kind of "scene". Music for example isn't created only by an individual, it comes from listening and watching and playing with others. Later, you sit down and all of that input turns into something brand new.
I think at the same time I started getting "out of coding", I started getting deeper into music. And if it was just me, that would've been a short lived thing. But having people in real life to play with and bounce off makes it about 100x better and keeps you going long after you would've fallen off on your own.
I'd encourage anyone who feels this way to find something similar. The act of creation is still as essential as before, you just need to direct your energy toward something more purely human. Get into writing, drawing, woodworking... even as these things are instantly mass-producible, we'll still value and pay for humans to do them.
I think this has really softened the blow for me!
- This is well put and something I think a lot of us struggle with.
The internet itself seems filled with the AI maximalists who have no end of hype for the latest prompt 'technique' or AI doomers that would skin you alive if you mention you used AI to make a photo once.
Quietly among peers I talk to there seems to be a very different group that exists: those that recognize AI is super valuable for getting a lot of work done but also feel that suddenly the work is so much less exciting than it was before.
Sure, there's the obvious "I enjoy the mechanics of programming" component that's gone but then there's also this general feeling that is hard to shake which feels a little deeper. I've wondered about it. Is it all the layoffs? The suddenly shaky economics for a lot of our companies? The uncertainty of the career's future in general?
I think the author has put their thumb on it well to describe it as a lack of intellectual community. That feels like at least part of it.
- The whole John Donne meditation the title is referencing:
(had to memorize it in High School, and its one of my favorites. It was written over 400 years ago and has aged quite well.)No man is an island, Entire of itself; Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, As well as if a promontory were: As well as if a manor of thy friend's Or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for theeby varenc