I see people who I respect, admire and believe are far smarter than me saying AI is great. I read lots of things praising AI and I see some posts where people pick on one problem with it or another. I think there is valid tech in there somewhere but the level of oxygen theft going on right now is, well, suffocating. If you love AI and want to use it every waking minute of your day you don't need to read this. If you are a skeptic for whatever reason maybe you'll find ideas here that resonate with you.
This is not to say AI is all nonsense and there aren’t interesting technical aspects to some of it. This is more personal and why I don’t really want it in my work.
tl;dr: wherein I destroy any hope of ever getting work from one of those hip new vibe coding shops.
I've been developing software my entire life. I started on a Commodore 64 writing basic. I even had the basic programming cartridge for my Atari 2600 that didn’t do much more than allow you to write some loops with goto statements. My high school had a 4 year program in programming where we used fortran, basic and even some punchcards to see how that worked. We took attendance on a teletype machine. In my senior year we finally got some hot new TRS80s. I've been doing this a long time.
I went to college for architecture and practiced with my own firm for almost 20 years until I got tired of the once in a lifetime economic slumps that occurred every few years killing my business. I was always developing software even while running my architecture firm. I wrote lisp for AutoCAD and used a few other proprietary languages to develop add-ons for whatever CAD system I was using at the time. One CAD app I used was written in Delphi using Object Pascal and I wrote for that eventually working directly for the company that wrote the CAD program itself. I had a double track career for a long time, Architecture and Software.
About 15 years ago during yet another economic downturn when the only work out there for architects was dormers and decks instead of lake houses I decided enough was enough and I would flip the script and focus on software development full time. The iPhone had just come out and I was very interested in writing apps for it.
It wasn't just the economic roller coaster of residential architectural practice. I enjoyed the work. I liked designing things for people and seeing them built. What I didn't like was nine times out of ten the customer would end the relationship with me when the contractor came on board to build the project. This is normal in residential work. Most homeowners don’t need to pay an architect to supervise the builder. Generally the work went well but often the contractor would make some mistake or just want to cut a corner and naturally the architect was to blame for whatever he decided was "wrong." I got tired of not seeing the process through to completion. I suppose I could have become a design/build firm where I designed the building then did the actual contruction. I had built things but I didn't really want to do that. Software development felt like something where I could control the whole process and I really enjoyed that.
Some of that need for control is probably a hindrance but I am the type who doesn't use any third party dependencies unless there is no other choice. I want to know my code and know how it works. I don't want to trust that someone elses code is good and will be maintained as needed indefintely. Sure I've had employers insist we use framework A or library B and I've seen the problems when a developer of a framework loses interest and their code no longer works. Mostly, I just enjoy writing code, figuring things out and making it work.
So now we're being told AI is coming for our jobs, programmers will be redundant, machines can do this. The optimistic take is that developers just need to use AI tools to help then write code. I don't want any AI to write my code. I like writing code. I hear how it saves so much time. The testimonies range from just tell the computer what sort of app to spit out and it will just do it or it's like pair programming with a bad junior, writing something code like but you still need to fix it.
This is very appealing to bean counters, VCs and tech bros. I don't like any of those people. They only exist to make themselves rich(er). These sorts of people wouldn't know good craftsmanship if Michelangelo himself dropped the statue of David on their heads. They don't care. These are the people pushing this crap.
Is there interesting tech here? Yes. Did they steal every piece of code they could get their hands on to do a William S. Burroughs cut up job and spit back something that might work or might just be made up function names and gibberish? Yes, they did that too. They robbed authors, artists and you as a developer. If your code was in a repo your hosting service decided was fair game to share to train these AI models they robbed from you. In our society built around the idea that the rich never see any consequences there is likely to be further theft. Did Uber or AirBnB worry about taxi or hotel laws or did they just do what they wanted, become big and popular enough and most importantly make this whole class of people so much money that they would never dare stop it? That happened and this is happening with AI right now.
People are losing their jobs or unable to find new work because the money people decided they can replace us all with AI. They can't. Most of my own consulting work has dried up and many of my peers are being cut loose. I believe it's not that people are seeing productivity gains from AI, it's that they think it's coming. It may be but it won't be here for a long time and an awful lot of mistakes and ethical transgressions are being made along the way. There is a mindset in tech that if the big boys are doing it we should do it too. So if Microsoft cuts ten thousand employees the five man consulting shop thinks they should let two people go and wait for that sweet AI productivity to start paying off.
Every piece of software is integrating AI nonsense just to be a part of this. There are valid uses for machine learning and AI. It's cool when my phone knows I drive to a certain location on Thursday and pops up a map to show me the traffic when I never asked it to. It's not cool when AI tries to summarize messages and makes an ass of itself. It’s not helpful when your search results are filled with AI generated nonsense. Moderation would be a start here.
I've seen people say it takes the power of three suns to generate the AI Models and I've heard you could do it on the Apollo lander computer or a potato. I don't care enough to dig in there so I have no clear thoughts on that aspect.
In ancient times your computer came ready to write programs you could run. Most operating systems still include programming tools and compilers or you can download what you need. It's one of the last areas where you can get the tools to create things for no cost. A copy of basic came with DOS. You can download Python for your computer today. You can find online resources to help you learn (though AI spam is starting to make this harder.) The cost of entry is almost nothing once you've got the machine. The overlords of our new AI utopia would have us all subscribe to their services to gain access to this wonder tool to help take away the joy of programming. I'm not really interested in yet another subscription. I don't want to dwell on the cancer that is capitalism but this is a prime example of numbers must go up econmic theory. The suits need growth so they take something that was free or a one time cost, slap a subscription on it and like magic they get recurring revenue. This barrier of entry is a problem. It's not unimaginable that people will have to work in some computer slave farm at some point to have access to the best AI tools. It's not far fetched to soon see recruitment ads advertising perks including a new MacBook and access to ChatGPT 11. The rich get richer. The rest of us get nothing.
Even if half of the optimism is warranted, AI is going to end the career path that we've long had where juniors become senior and staff engineers. Supposedly there will be people focusing on how to ask the AI to do the correct thing (and to think people used to say Software Engineering was not engineering.) There may still be a need for the high level folks to make sure the prompt engineer guys got it right. That assumes the suits even care if it's right. Where will the new senior engineers come from? Right now there are people around who know how things need to be to work but if the newer developers are vibe coding what are they learning? How will they even know what's correct? They won't because they can't. The path from junior enginer to senior is paved with thousands of mistakes. That's how you learn. If you don't make those mistakes you rarely learn. If the machine makes a mistake how do you know? What did you learn?
At the end of the day my main problem with AI is I am an older programmer who just wants to write code, solve problems and make cool shit. I'm nearer the end of my career than the begining so I can probably resist a lot of this crap. I don't want to ask my IDE to do it for me. I want to solve the problems. I want to fit the pieces together into an intersting whole. I'd rather be a person that spends a lot of time making flawed apps than the guy who vibe coded some complete crap in a night.
I don't want to stop anyone who actually enjoys working or just playing with AI tools from having a good time. I am a geek at heart and I enjoy playing with new technology too. Much of this feels like when people want to force their religious beliefs on the rest of us. You do your thing and leave us be. The preachers of this new AI religion, like many of the old religions, just want to line their pockets and they don't care about the consequences as they never see any. Remember crypto, NFTs, etc? Like political pundits it doesn't matter if they are wrong. They still get paid. Everyone else deals with the fallout and the pundits go on making shit up.
I know the story of how I came to this line of thinking is unique but I doubt I'm alone. I suspect there are a lot of us out here. Tell us what you need and let us do the work. You know, like actual intelligence.
