Yes, very much so. I am in favour of pushing into the future as fast as we can, so to speak, but I think ChatGPT is a temporary boost that is going to slow us in the long run.
Plus one to all that. I'm sure there are some upsides to the current wave of ML and I'm all for pushing ahead into the future, but I think the downsides of our current llm obsession far outweighs the good.
Think 5-10 years from now, once this thing has burned it's course through the current job market, and people who grew up with this technology have gone through education without learning anything and gotten to the age they need to start earning money. We're in so much trouble.
We're going to be in our 70s still writing code because LLMs will dumb down the next generation to the point where they won't be able to get software to work.
Which luckily coincides with our social security and retirement systems collapsing.
Just to get more out of the electronics where others can't match what I had decades ago. Things have come a long way but icing on the cake is still needed for a more complete solution, and by now it's more clear than ever what to do.
Actually the first year after "retiring" from my long-term employer was spent on music servers as a hobbyist. Then right back to industrial chemical work since. It's been nice not to have any bosses or deadlines though.
>Or do you actually need the money.
Not really, actually waiting until 70 to collect Social Security so I will get the maximum available to me, and haven't even started drawing from my main retirement fund. I plan to start my second company funded entirely by the Social Security though.
>In my 20s I wanted to retire by 40. Now in my 30s I've accepted that's impossible.
This is one area where I am very very far from the mainstream. I grew up in a "retirement community" known as South Florida. Where most people have always been over 65. Nothing like the 50 states from Orlando on up. Already been there and done that when I was young and things were way more unspoiled. When I was still a teenager (Nixon Recession) we were some of the first in the USA where it was plain to see that natives like me would not be able to afford to live in our own hometown. Even though student life was about as easy as the majority of happy retirees. I knew I already had it good, and expected to always continue to run a business of some kind when I got to be a senior citizen, and never stop. There were really so many more examples of diverse old-timers than any other place I am aware of.
>I like programing and working on projects, I hate filing TPS reports all day and never ending meetings.
I actually do like programming too or I wouldn't have done it at all. I started early and have done some pioneering work, but never was in a software company. There was just not many people who could do the programming everywhere it was needed as computerization proliferated in petrochemicals. Now there's all kinds of commercial software and all I have to do is "just" tie up the loose ends if I want to. I mainly did much more complete things on my own, and the way I wanted to. Still only when needed, and not every year. In my business I earned money by using my own code, not selling it at all.
I know what you mean about never ending BS, big corporate industrial bureaucracy was challenging enough to survive around as a contractor, I don't think I could tolerate "lack of progress" reports or frequent pointless meetings for code on top of that, especially when I'm trying to keep my nose to the grindstone and really get something worthwhile accomplished :)
I actually think I'm trying Just to get more out of the electronics where others can't match what I had decades ago.to get to where your at.
I like programming. I want to start a company and hire smart people.
But I don't want that to be my main means of support.
>Just to get more out of the electronics where others can't match what I had decades ago.
I'm forced to assume you have a particular niche here.
I hope to be able to write code as long as I'm here, but I want it to be a hobby when I'm old.
Hopefully the hobby includes collaborations with others. A lot of people have vanity wine shops and book stores which lose money, I want a vanity game studio ( maybe music production software too).
Yup, just like my dad built his own house, and I have to call a plumber/electrician.
I can do SOME things, but for more advanced, I need to call a professional.
Coincidently the plumber/electrician always complains about the work done by the person before him/her. Kinda like I do when I need to fix someone else's code.
I mean seriously is this the prediction folks are going with? Ok so we can build something like our SOTA coding agents today, breathing life into these things that 3 years ago were laughable science fiction, and your prediction is it will be worse from here on out? Do you realize coding is a verifiable domain which means we don’t technically even need any human data to improve these models? Like in your movie of 2050 everyone’s throwing their hands up “oh no we made them dumber because people don’t need to take 8 years of school and industry experience to build a good UI and industry best practice backend infrastructure”. I guess we can all predict what we want but my god
That's an INCREDIBLY good point about synthetic training data. During model training, AI agents could pretty much start their own coding projects, based on AI-generated wish-lists of features, and verify progress on their own. This leads to limitless training data in the area of coding.
Coding agents is what I’m talking about, they are also an old idea, everything is an old idea, what is new and a major step change is the realized capability of them in December 2025.
No, I’m saying AS OF Dec 2025. 2025 itself being a step change in that coding agent adoption has undergone a step change as a result of model quality and agent interface being good enough.
Understood, but I still think you're exaggerating. Tool use is a 2024 thing, and progress on model quality this year has been downright vomit-inducing (looking at you, OpenAI...)
What would you have expected model quality to have been this year, it’s greatly exceeded my expectations, I’m genuinely confused by this perspective…considering where we were a very very short time ago
I find a lot of folks share this sentiment but from where I sit it just sounds so much like the “kids these days” crap that spawned all of YOU folks when you were younger. I grew up so inspired by the internet culture of the nineties, people that understood a technology and had a passion for wrangling it to do great things. We had a mixed run and the internet today has simultaneously exceeded these early dreams by orders of magnitude in some ways and has become absolutely Orwellian and backwards in others. Same thing is happening here. It’s just so interesting seeing the same peers have such an identical take on this generations paradigm shift as the folks that we all ridiculed in the 90s. Those hilarious badly aged takes on the internet being a fad or not user friendly enough etc etc, I guess my naivite was to expect this time around we would be able to better recognize it in ourselves
Have you considered that the people in the 1990s were mostly correct, and it's you that has been corrupted by modern marketing influences and external pressures?
There's no shortage of "Chicken Little" technologies that look great on-paper and fail catastrophically in real life. Tripropellant rockets, cryptocurrencies, DAOs, flying cars, the list never ends. There's nothing that stops AI from being similarly disappointing besides scale and expectation (both of which are currently unlimited).
Again another common take; hint: if you’re against AI or the current investment in AI you have so many better and more nuanced arguments at your disposal than “AI is chicken little”. It’s already here. I’ve built so much stuff with Claude and Codex I’d have never have been able to build at a speed that is already incredible and it’s getting better and better every 6 months. Be worried about alignment or centralized unregulated power, worry about what wars will look like and how this is a pre packaged Stasi for any dictatorship. But “this is a fad equivalent in stupidity and hype to cryptocurrency and tripropellant rockets” is just kind of silly
I use AI regularly, it regularly disappoints me. I won't worry about alignment or centralizing the singularity because AI does nothing that we haven't seen already.
The one thing that AI hasn't done that was promised a million times over is make money.
Do you genuinely believe this? That AI is not making money? Maybe you just are referring to another tired refrain of people who don’t appear to understand the strategic play of pure AI companies which is that they operate at a loss?
I don't have to believe anything, I just look at the S&P 500 and see the same old stuff. Nvidia is enjoying the shovel shortage, but none of the gold-rushers have discovered anything better than CUDA. Nothing new under the sun.
> people who don’t appear to understand the strategic play of pure AI companies
Get a load of this guy. Strategy in isolation is worthless; Russia has excellent strategic deterrence that is utterly useless for deterring Ukraine. Pure crypto companies had strategic foresight, but none of it was worth a damn when they had to compete with each other on merit.
The strategic play is perfectly well-understood. The tactical side is not, so far Nvidia is the only company that has gone to war and won.
“Russia has excellent deterrence” is what you’re trying to say sanctions are not working to stop what Russia is doing to Ukraine? That not only demonstrates a bad understanding of geopolitics and how sanctions work, but also distracts from what we are actually talking about.
It’s not really clear to me what you are trying to say. There will be winners and losers and it will be hard to know who they will be. That has nothing to do with Anthropic/OpenAI/etc not being rational in their strategy...
Some of us do, and actively root it out. I’ve never in my life been more excited to sit alone in a room with an editor and a compiler than I am these days.
Anecdote from me. I’m in a video games slack channel with ~350 of my coworkers who know well what ai looks like and like video games. Everyone hates it. I’d love a permanent steam selection to hide generative ai.
Another vote for Haskell. It’s fun and the parsing bit is easy. I do struggle with some of the 2d map style questions which are simpler in a mutable 2d array in c++. It’s sometimes hard to write throwaway code in Haskell!
I've always been a big fan of apple and have defended them in the past, but iOS 26 is a dumpster fire. There are visual corruptions and glitches all over the place and transparent text floating over transparent text. It's not even whether I like the style or not, it's just broken. Who signed off on this? No product in this state would ever leave one of my teams, I'd resign first.
The UK government want to get on with blocking websites and VPNs as soon as possible. 4chan was obviously not going to comply and was picked to allow ofcom to quickly move onto the next step.
The kind of things that LLMs can make without tremendous amounts of hand holding... Are they the kind of projects that you like to write code for?
I became a programmer because I want to explore the edge of what's possible. I'm finding it still satisfying when I'm doing it via LLM. They're only good at spitting out entire projects when those projects resemble many that already exist.
Beautifully put. I'm about as excited for LLMs as an artist would be for a robot that can paint. I know a lot of people out there can't imagine actually enjoying programming though.
One does not have to be a carpenter to have furniture, and one does not have to become a software engineer to get computers to do things.
Unless you are into it, you’ll realize that it’s quite a grind and your time is much better spent getting somebody who is into it (and thanks to that became an expert to it) get computer to do what you want faster and better.
There’s nothing wrong with trying it, if anything to find out whether you are into it or not in the first place. If you stick to it, chances are you are into it—just like you don’t become a carpetner simply because you want to have furniture: perhaps that’s one of your initial impulses, but you are also mentally compatible with the process and tick some other boxes.
On that note, what does it mean to be “into it” when it comes to programming? What is a “good” reason to become a software engineer? To me, it’s about the inclination to tinker, the eventual payoff of the dopamine rush from seeing puzzle pieces fall together, and the desire to own the process, do things by yourself even as you stand on the shoulders of giants.
Between these things, LLM-driven development strikes me as somewhat weak on tinkering (there may be some, but less, and much less precise and deterministic), and very weak on the desire to do things by yourself. Of course, that shouldn’t invalidate anyone’s personal experience.
For me it is both. I love certain kinds of programming, and don't enjoy other kinds. I'm naturally very good at some kinds, and not good at other kinds, despite putting in enormous effort.
I guess ideally I'd get a job that is perfectly aligned with this profile (a work in progress!), but AI allows me to deal with the reality I have now in a much more pleasant and productive way.
Careful with the productivity claims, there's plenty of research showing that perspective is usually a distortion of some kind. Which makes sense, you have someone at your shoulder constantly reassuring you and bubbling ideas; I can see how it feels productive. Many report feeling more stressed, because the spaces where they used to think are no longer there.
For what it's worth, collecting new problems to solve is actually the main fuel for improving the AIs, so if GenAI becomes good at creating problems, which it can iterate on tackling, then there's a flywheel going.
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